WeatherClock - Part 1

This is first in a series of posts detailing the build and programming for what I'm calling a "Weather Clock." The folks at AccuWeather have nice mobile app that includes a real-time, minute-by-minute forecast of precipitation for the next two hours. What's neat about this is the visualization. They present a ring, with "right now" at the top and the minutes flowing along clockwise, just a like a -- well -- a clock. Each minute on the clock face is colored to represent the type and intensity of precipitation expected for the next two hours. Here's a picture, showing light rain starting in about 26 minutes, heavier rain around 90.

I always liked this visual, and thought it would be fun to build one of these weather clocks and hang it on a wall. You could certainly do this mostly/entirely in software by building an app to run on a tablet, then hang the tablet on the wall. But in this case I wanted to tinker around with actually building dedicated hardware. Like many people drawn to building internet-connected devices, my background is in software -- not hardware -- so I approached this project with a little trepidation. Turns out there wasn't much to fear, this came together pretty well (I think). By the end of this series of posts, I'll have provided links to everything -- the hardware components, the code, etc. I welcome any and all comments about how this could've been done better, or differently, or whatever.