Working with Dark Sky Weather API on your Weather Display

You need a good data source if you want to display real-time weather information on your information display. A good source is the Dark Sky Weather API, formerly known as Forecast.io. You can sign up as a user to start accessing the weather API. We start with this presentation design where we mainly display the current temperature of our location, weather condition and the forecast for the next couple of days.

We use our DataPoint as PowerPoint add-on.  It allows you to collect information from various sources and display this in real-time on your slides. You can build your own dynamic digital signage screen in PowerPoint, with real-time content.

Click DataPoint in the PowerPoint ribbon to open its options. Then click the List button of the Connections group.

In the DataPoint Providers, select the Weather by Dark Sky and click the Add query button.

In the field API Key enter your Dark Sky Secret key as you got it from Dark Sky. Here you see ours (don’t even try, we have changed it already).   All calls to the Dark Sky API will use this secret key. In case, that you don’t have a secret key yet, sign up at Dark Sky.  You can execute 1000 free calls a day.  Beyond that number, you will have to pay. 1000 free calls are enough to display the weather info of a few locations. Don’t worry about that.

Next we need to know the location or position to get the weather information from. This point on our globe Earth is set as latitude and longitude position. If you don’t know the latitude and longitude of your city, just click the www.latlong.net link and look up the information.

Enter the name of the city, optionally the state and click the Find button.  The latitude and longitude information is displayed.

Enter your Latitude and Longitude value back on the settings form.

Furthermore, you can check if you want to include currently, hourly and daily information. Default information will be currently and daily, which is the typical information that you put on your slide.

Choose your scale; Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Select the language in which you want to display the weather condition texts.

Choose an icon set for the weather icons.

And finally check and change your data refresh rate. 900 seconds is 15 minutes.  So with this rate, you would perform 94 calls (24 x 4) per day.

Click OK to close.

DataPoint collects now the weather information of your chosen location and you will see a preview of the raw weather data. Click OK to confirm.

Select the text box that would host the current temperature. Click the Text box button of the DataPoint menu to set its options.

Leave the default data connection and default row number, but set the column to CurrentlyTemperature.  You will see a preview of its value.

Note that there are decimals in the number and we don’t want to display this here as irrelevant.

Click the Format tab and choose Number at the Category. Set the Decimal places to 0 and click OK to link its value dynamically.

The dynamic temperature as it is returned by Dark Sky is now dynamically linked to this text box.

Select another text and click the DataPoint text box button.  As column, choose CurrentlySummary and click OK to link it.

Now the forecast for the next coming days. Select the text box and click the Text box button of DataPoint. Link it to the column named Daily01Time. 01 for tomorrow. Time actually is the date here.

Click the Format tab and set it to Custom. Enter the custom format \d\ ddd. \d\ is to declare that you want to use it as date or time format and ddd to indicate the abbreviated day of the date value. Click OK to close.

Due to this custom formatting, the value Wed is now displayed in the text box.

Select the weather icon of the first day and click the Picture button.

DataPoint asks a confirmation that you want to use a dynamic picture instead of a static picture on your slide.  Of course you want this. Click Yes to continue.

Set the column to Daily01Icon and click OK. We don’t need to change anything else on this form.

Now you have enough information to complete this slide. Set the minimum and maximum temperature of this day too. And then complete the images and text boxes for the forecast information of the next 3 days.

You can now start your slide show and DataPoint and Dark Sky will continuously update the linked information.