I once considered doing a project similar to this one, using an esp8266, but decided against it since it would be too depressing.
> Additionally, since it rains so rarely, if it’s going to rain, people are usually talking about it at least a day in advance.
Was odd that such prevalence was placed on the coasts by the author.
It's pretty humorous to read this perspective. The west coast must truly be as fantastic as advertised.
> how do you debug hardware? One way is by using a multimeter.
:(
> A friend at the Recurse Center let me borrow Saleae’s logic analyzer
Phew! Multimeter is not the way to go unless you really have no other option.
I've never had a big enough, or time dependent enough project to require anything more than a multimeter and patience, so I've not put the cash forward for a logic analyzer, or oscilloscope, or whatever. Not entirely sure what the difference is anyways...
While these vendors usually just tell you to use Saleae's software, you can and should use the awesome open-source Sigrok (https://sigrok.org) tool, which supports these knockoff clones!
I like showing people how to hook up ESP8266s to the OpenWeatherMap API[1] - it's a quick and useful example and it seems to get people thinking about home automation. One fun way to display the results very cheaply is to use just a few of those colored LEDs for things like temperature ('blue->yellow->red') and conditions (yellow for sunny, grey for overcast, blue for rain, etc.)
But then I'm sure you'd pay for it in the hairiness of the aruduino/led board interface, haha.
