Where can I find weather tiles?
There are a few common approaches for displaying weather in SharpTools.
- Use the 'Open Weather' custom tile
- Use a supported weather 'device'
- Use an image in a Media Tile
Custom Tile
The 'Open Weather' custom tile can display the current weather alongside a 6 day forecast. This uses data from Open Weather Map, so you'll need to register for free API Key to use it (details in the linked post).
See the community post for more details, including setup instructions:
Weather Device
SmartThings
For SmartThings, you’ll need to have the built-in SmartWeather Station device installed. You can add the SmartWeather Station from the SmartThings IDE:
SmartThings is in the process of shutting down the SmartThings IDE and their Groovy platform. At this point in time, it is unclear how long this method will be supported or if a replacement will be provided by SmartThings. The Open Weather approach method mentioned above is a reasonable alternative for displaying weather in your dashboard.
- Login to the SmartThings IDE:
https://account.smartthings.com/ - Go to the Devices tab
- Click the New Device button in the top-right corner
- Configure the new device:
- Choose whatever you would like for the name and network id.
- Change the type to SmartWeather Station Tile
- Choose your location.
- Leave everything else alone
- Click Create
If you don’t have a zip code / location specified within your SmartThings account, you may also need to edit the newly created device’s preferences and specify a zip code.
When you’re done, be sure to authorize the newly created device from your
SharpTools.io user page and then you be able to add it to your dashboard and it will show up as a weather tile as shown in this thread:
Hubitat
For Hubitat, the built-in OpenWeatherMap driver is a solid choice for basic weather support. There’s also several different community drivers available with Matthew's OpenWeatherMap driver being a popular choice:
Historically, a
modified version of Matthew's DarkSky.net weather driver was a popular choice for weather. Unfortunately, Dark Sky was acquired by Apple and has stopped issuing API Keys. If you already have a valid API Key, then it should continue working through 2022. Otherwise, you might try one of the many community developed drivers.
Home Assistant
The default weather forecast (met.no) from Home Assistant is supported as a weather card.
Media Tile
You can use Media Tiles along with a weather image to create a media tile. A common source for weather images is your local news website.
For example, you might visit your local NBC, ABC, or CBS affiliate and look for their weather page wherein you'll frequently find a static image showing the upcoming weather forecast. Note that this varies for each news source - sometimes the images are right on the weather page and sometimes they are on a specific 7 or 10 day forecast page.
Also note that some weather website display the weather in HTML or in a live streaming video - what we are looking for is a normal static image. In Google Chrome, you can usually right-click on an image and choose 'Copy image address'. Alternatively, you can right-click and choose 'Inspect' which will bring up the source code for the page with the element holding the image highlighted - in this case, you are looking to see if there is an image available as a .png .jpg or other static image type.
Having trouble finding a weather image? Try the weather widget below or post on the community for one-on-one help!
Another alternative is to use an online weather widget generator. For example, theweather.com has a great widget generator which outputs an image which can be used in a media tile.
See below for more details on each approach!
Weather Widget
There's a great online tool for building a custom weather widget available at:
The tool provides a variety of options for customizing the location, layout, colors, icons, etc.
When using theweather.com widget, make sure to choose the image option at the end and then copy only the value out of the 'src' attribute into the SharpTools.io Media Tile creation screen.
For example, if the generated content is:
<img src="https://www.theweather.com/wimages/fotof0a9eeee73f3fc775cc86a08c4e01b01.png ">
You'll want just the URL in the 'src' attribute:
https://www.theweather.com/wimages/foto97bd774cb64c2e033944cb57e3c37fab.png
Full Local Example
For example, a search for "Dallas Local News" in Google results in WFAA (ABC), NBC DFW (NBC), Fox 4 News (Fox), etc.
Upon opening the website of the first result, WFAA, I opened the menu on the left side of the page and found Weather > Hourly and 10-day
Once in that page, the 10-day forecast was displayed as a static image and I am able to right-click and copy the image address.
From there, you can navigate back to SharpTools.io and create a Media Tile with the copied URL:
