First thing needed is a sd card the the operating system loaded. I used Raspbian Jessie Lite.

Use a program such as etcher.io to burn the image to the sd card. Once that is complete we will need to add two files to the boot directory so the pi will have ssh enabled and the correct wifi information.

Open the wpa_supplicant.conf file with a text editor and put your wifi ssid and password in it. Then add the file to the sd card. To enable ssh we just need a file labeled ssh with no extensions put on the sd card also.

A better explanation of this can also be found on this guide at adafruit.com

Connect to Pi

I use a program called putty and SSH in to the Pi. Some documentation on doing this can be found on the Raspberry Pi website.

One difference is there they have you find the IP of the pi. I have found it easier to just use the hostname to connect which is raspberrypi.local

Install libraries needed

First we need pip so run this command

sudo apt-get install python-pip

Now we can install requests.

pip install requests

Next we will install the items needed to use the NeoPixels. These steps are take from a guide titled NeoPixels on Raspberry Pi from the Adafruit website.

sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev git scons swig

After that we run these commands

git clone <a href="https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x.git"> https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x.git > cd rpi_ws281x scons

Then

cd python sudo python setup.py install

Now the required libraries should all be installed.

Get the program on the Pi

I would recommend getting the files from the GitHub repository as the code may change or be fixed at some times. https://github.com/keebie81/Weather-Forecast-Cloud

You can cut and paste the contents into a new file or use WinSCP to transfer the files.

If cutting and pasting you will want to make a new file using this command

sudo nano cloud.py

Then paste in the contents of cloud.py

Once you there you might need to change a few values. If you used a different amount of NeoPixels or GPIO pin

If the amount of NeoPixels used is different change LED_COUNT. Same if the GPIO pin used is different change LED_PIN

Also on line 72 you need the change the location, unless you want the forecast for sheboygan.

Run the code

Once you got your changes made you can test out the code.

sudo python cloud.py

The cloud should light up now and in the terminal window you should see it output what today's high and low is along with tomorrows high and low.

Set to auto run at startup

To configure auto start I followed this guide from the Raspberry Pi website

This is the line of code I added to the rc.local file.

python /home/pi/cloud.py &