How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room? 2

Piggybacking off of PyWeather 3, How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room 2 (now referred to as How Hot 2) is the upgraded, more modular version of How Hot 1 designed for PyWeather 2.

Due to the simple fact that PyWeather 3 has a lot more sensors monitoring environmental data, I had to build a new web portal to show all that data.

Data is collected from the I2C sensors onboard PyWeather 3, uploaded to DynamoDB every 5 minutes, then a Flask-based server reads those values to render the page.

—

Lines of code: ~600

Languages: HTML, JavaScript, Python

Frameworks: Materialize (based on Bootstrap 4), Flask, DynamoDB

Timeframe: January 2021

—

How Hot Is It In My Dorm Room? 2 is powered by the PyWeather 3 project. You can see more about PyWeather 3 here.

—

You can visit this project at howhot.owenthe.dev.

The main screen for How Hot 2. It’s very similar to How Hot 1, just with much more data.

The status indicators remain from How Hot 1 (including three more for humidity/dew point/air quality, but not for pressure. Where applicable, a delta to the outside condition is provided.

All fields have some form of change in the past 24 hours to see if things are getting hotter, colder, more humid, less humid, etc etc.

At some point in September 2021, I replaced the ambient light field with a dew point field, as I found this data more useful.

There’s also a link to some long-term climate thing that got added…more on this later.

Since there’s so many different data types, I added a graph switcher so that graphs for a certain type of data are only on screen.

At the end of the graph line, you can see me employ the genius climate strategy, open the window until it gets cold enough then close it. Whack-a-window strategy anyone?

For each data type, there’s usually a graph for historical data, change over 24 hours, and the change versus outside conditions (computed via Dark Sky for Temperature, Humidity, and Dew Point).

Additionally, I added graphs for a 1 hour change in every data type but Air Quality. It’s actually super useful to see the hourly rate that the room is warming up/cooling down at.

More graphs! Now, I wonder what clicking on that link in the first image does…

How Hot now has long-term climatology data!

This is an interesting feature that tries to summarize the climate of the room over the course of the day, and compares it to the data from the previous day.

For this page - all the fields are supported but pressure. For each field, you can see today’s high, low, and variation. You can also see how the day (so far) has compared to yesterday with a text summary.

Long-term climate data is shown in two selectable ways to the user - graphs or tables.

Yes, it really did hit nearly 93 degrees in the dorm room. For the first week of the 2021-2022 school year, it was super hot.

Graphs contain three lines for each day. The red line represents the maximum for the day, blue line the minimum for the day, and yellow the average.

You can see how the room temperature has settled down as the year has gone on, and when the heat kicked in (the days with huge variations).

As you can see on the dew point graph, it’s been falling as winter is approaching.

Here’s the tables view in action. For each day, you can see the high, average, low, and daily variation. For the high and low fields, you can also see when it happened.

Additionally, for the high/average/low fields, you can see the change compared to the previous day’s high/average/low. Basically, all the data you’d ever want.

Listed at the bottom of the page are the all time records. You can see the record high & low for each type of data, when the record occurred, and the variation from record high and low.

And that’s How Hot 2!