Some weather apps

Yesterday's post started out about the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat, and ended up looking at the Barometer app for Lumia 950. Today, I'll look at a couple more useful weather apps for your Lumia 950.

Thermometer
I have been using GPS Thermometer Free from Jappi-Soft. This app uses your current location at matches it with publicly available weather station data to show the outside temperature for your location.

GPS Thermometer Free on Lumia 950

The paid version includes a live tile with adverts removed. Both versions include a choice of accent colours and displays. Bizarrely, several people in the comments section of the app were disappointed because the app doesn't display the inside temperature of their homes. These people have clearly misunderstood how this app works. I will reiterate: It finds the nearest weather station to you and displays the temperature as measured by that weather station on your screen.

Sun and Moon
I love this app. Sun & Moon by Ronca is a simple app that gives a representation of where the sun and moon are currently located in their daily cycles.

Sun and moon on Lumia 950 showing the current position of the sun as though you were facing South on a cloudless day.

It also shows the sun rise and sunset times and the expected hours of sunlight. Sadly, the app does not cope with the annoying habit we Brits have of setting our clocks forward one hour in summer, so you you also need to add one hour onto the times displayed onscreen.

Perfect Weather
This is one of the most beautiful weather apps I have seen for Windows 10. Perfect Weather is a universal app, which means it is available for both your phone and PC, or any other device running Windows 10. It defaults to your current location, however you can set it other locations as well. Your display will show the current weather conditions, temperature, wind speed and direction, sun rise and set times, air pressure, moon phase, moon rise and set times. In effect it does everything the other two apps do plus more. Sliding your finger across the display will show an animation of the weather for that day. If you want to pay for the full version you will get a choice of background themes which include a Star Wars theme, presumably so you can see what the weather is like onTatooine  (presumably hot during the day, and cold at night).

Perfect Weather Universal showing the weather in Fantasia after The Nothing had finished doing its work.

Part of my Lumia 950 homescreen in all its Windows 10 goodness.

Sharing a usb drive to chromebook, raspberry pi, Android and Windows 10

I noticed that my new home router comes with a USB port. I figured that it was possible to connect an external hard-drive and use my router as a home file server. This means that I will be able to share files between my Chromebook, Raspberry Pi, Android tablet and Windows machines.

Here are the steps I used by device.

First steps
Plug in your usb drive and check the admin settings on your home hub.  I get there through the default address of my router which is 192.168.1.254 and yours is likely to be similar.  It is a good opportunity to change the admin password at this stage.

In Windows 10
Access to the shared network drive is as easy as opening the file explorer and typing the address into the address bar eg //192.168.1.254

Your files are now ready to be accessed on all your devices.

On a Chromebook.
It would be useful to access my PC files on my Chromebook as well.  I used File System for Windows.

Your shared files are now available in the ChromeOS File app.

On Raspberry Pi under Raspbian

1. You need to mount the network drive into the Raspbian file system.  To do this you need to have cifs-utils installed.  My Raspberry Pi 2 came with this pre-installed.  You can check whether it exists or not by running the following command: dpkg -s cifs-utils

2. Should you need it, you can install cifs using the command sudo apt-get install cifs-utils 

3. Next create a directory on your pi for where you want to mount the network drive: sudo mkdir -p /media/network/public

4. You need to edit the etc/fstab file in order to mount the network drive. You may need to give yourself permission to do this, so navigate to your /etc folder and type chown pi: fstab (where pi is your username).

5. Now open the etc/fstab file in your text editor and add the following single line:

   //192.168.1.254/usb1 /media/network/public cifs defaults,rw,username=pi,password=yourpassword,domain=domain 0 0

  Note that the first part is //IP ADDRESS OF ROUTER/directory name of network folder

 If your network folder has any spaces in the name, eg "My Documents", then replace the spaces with \040, eg My\040Documents.

 The second part is the path to the folder you created in part 3.

 You will need to put in your own username and password .

6. Now mount the drive using sudo mount -a

Android

There is no single file explorer app for Android, but many of them allow you to access network drives. I use ES file explorer which has a nice 'search' feature which will find your network drive in a few seconds. You can also pin your network drive to your desktop for easy access.

Accessing your network drive in Android

Windows Phone

I have downloaded Metro File Explorer to access my home network files on my Lumia 950.

That's all for now (I've run out of devices to try). It's time to backup to my file server and tidy up a bit.