weather.sh/weather_image

weather_image.sh

Uses a compatible variant of weather.sh in order to create an image suitable for backgrounds and screensavers with the time and weather embedded in it.

Contents

1. About
2. License
3. Prerequisites
4. How to use
5. TODO
6. Screenshots

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1. About

I have several applications that show screensavers of images, optionally from a directory. Which is great. But that doesn't have things like the time or current weather on them.

The ones I'd seen with that functionality had a tendency to crash after a couple of hours.

So building off the weather.sh script, I've hacked together a script that will embed the data onto a single image or a series of images. After configuring your screensaver (or whatever) to source images from a specific directory,

then you run weather_image.sh so that it outputs images to that directory every so often (like, uh, once a minute) and overwrites the older ones. You can source your images from a directory, a single file, or have it pull random images from pixabay. This program uses the cached data from weather.sh to minimize API calls if you're running both.

2. License

This project's code and documentation is licensed under the MIT license. For the full license, see LICENSE.

The artwork in the icons subdirectory is from the (free for commercial use) Weather Color icon set by Sihan Liu.

3. Prerequisites

• All the prereqs for weather.sh, as well as...
• shuf to shuffle output. Can be found in the coreutils package on major Linux distributions.
• imagemagick image manipulation. Can be found in the imagemagick-* package on major Linux distributions.
• wget command-line tool for getting data using HTTP protocol. Can be found in the wget package on major Linux distributions.
• fc-list command-line tool for listing fonts on the system. fc-list can be found in the fontconfig package on major Linux distributions.
• find command-line tool for finding files on the system. find can be found in the findutils package on major Linux distributions.
• OPTIONAL: fd-find as a drop-in for find. fd-find can be found in the fd-find package on major Linux distributions. This program looks for the binary to be named fdfind, not fd (Debian style).
• An appropriate font.

4. How to use

Once installed, run weather_images.sh with the appropriate commandline switches (below).

Installation

Clone the repository locally from the main directory. If you do not wish to clone the whole repository, go to the directory you wish to clone into, and perform the following (solution from here:

    git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/uriel1998/weather.sh 
    cd weather.sh
    git sparse-checkout set weather_image

Set up weather_sh.rc

weather_sh.rc

If you already have a working installation of weather.sh, then you can skip to "Command-line options".

Copy (and edit, as appropriate) the weather_sh.rc file to $HOME\.config\weather_sh.rc.

• The first line is the OpenWeatherMap API key
• The second line is your default location. (See note below)
• The third line is your default degree character (either c or f)
• The fourth line is True or False depending on whether or not you want icons displayed for the weather.
• The fifth line has no effect with weather_image.sh, only for weather.sh.

Command-line options

By default, weather_image.sh :

• sources all images from pixabay
• outputs file(s) to out.jpg in the script directory.
• attempts to use the following fonts, in this order: Interstate, Ubuntu, and Arial.

See below for information about customizing fonts and/or iconsets.

weather_image.sh can be started with the following command line options:

• -b : add blur
• -r : occasionally mix in random image from pixabay (hardcoded to every third for now)
• -help or -? : show help text
• -n ### : the number of output images to make (autonumbered).
• -d [directory] : image directory to choose from
• -i [file] : specific image file to use
• -h ### : height if sourced from pixabay
• -w ### : height if sourced from pixabay
• -o [full path] : specify output file
• -f [font family name] : specify font family to use
• -c [full path to config file] : specify config file (useful for crontab, etc)

Customization

Icon Sets

You can substitute in any images in PNG format, they just need to be located and named the same as the ones in the icons subdirectory.

Fonts

IMPORTANT
If it cannot find the font you chose or any of the three default fonts, it will choose a RANDOM font using fc-list.

IMPORTANT
If you choose a font family with a space in the name, it will choose a random font from that family, along with the following warning:

There is a space in your font family. Because of the way imagemagick
handles fonts, please use the *filename* of the font, by typing 
fc-list | grep -i "Font Family" and choosing the filename as displayed. 
We are now going to try to choose a random font from that family.

This is probably a limitation based on my coding skill; pull requests welcomed.

You can see examples of these three default fonts at the bottom of the page.

Please note that while weather_image.sh will do its best to find an appropriate size and placement for the text and icon, some font families will work better than others.

Examples

./weather_image.sh -f Abydos -n 3 -r -b -d /home/steven/my_images -o /home/steven/out.jpg

Results in three images in my home directory, named out_001.jpg, out_002.jpg, and out_003.jpg using the Abydos font on my system, pulling images from /home/steven/my_images, and every third image being pulled from pixabay, and applying a blur effect to all background images.

./weather_image.sh -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/NotoSerif-Black.ttf -o /home/steven/out.jpg

Results in one image in my home directory, named out.jpg, using the Noto Serif Black font, and pulling the source image from pixabay with no blur effect.

If your commandline gets a bit long, you may wish to use a wrapper script instead, particularly if you choose to use systemd timers instead of cron.

5. Todo

• Options for how often images are sourced from the internet

6. Screenshots