Te Muri is a rather special place, a little ways north of Auckland : a very limited camp site on a lovely calm beach, which is almost always available as you have to wade through an estuary at low tide to get there : no car access.
For a successful trip to Te Muri, I need to know the following things:
- tide times - which I can get from NIWA
- weather forecast - which I can get from OpenWeatherMap
Bored on a Sunday afternoon, I thought I’d build something to help me plan these trips … it’s convenient enough that if the weather and tides line up, we’ll pack up and leave in an hour, spend the night, and be back for breakfast and work the next day.
So how can I quickly find out if it’s lining up ?
Development plan
I built out a couple of Python scripts to test the APIS …
tides.pycompleted, can provide a simple list of low tides in NZ time.weather.pycompleted, can provide a simple list of rain, temp and weather.
… and then created a class Scryer to make both the calls and combine them into days.
Hardware
I have a dozen Raspberry Pi Picos lying around - which support Wifi - and have a couple of cute screens : a little OLED one from Waveshare with 64 x 128 pixels in black and white looks as though it will work.
I created a script to use the Scryer class - which I then had to modify for datetime support, as the normal library is not available in the MicroPython environment.
Now I just need to embed this in a frame with a power supply and leave it on my desk.
Web page
I also built a tiny React application to display the same information - and a nice photo or two - and published it to Firebase.
Thoughts
Note : the NIWA tide times are about 30 minutes or so earlier than the ones I see on MetService. This is quite a lot - enough to make me doubt that I’m doing it right (12 hours between tides is 4% error, and you’d suspect they’d be using the same models.)