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No. 14 · 2026In progress

Cloche

A bell-jar weather replicator. The interior of a glass cloche physically and visually mimics the current outside weather of a chosen city. LED ring renders the sky color for that location's local time, washed by the actual cloud cover. OLED panel shows sun or moon, current phase, temperature, condition. Eventually: humidifier for clouds, fan for wind, Peltier for fog, moss for the floor. Phase 1 built and running.

Status
In progress
Year
2026
Stack
Hardware · ESP32 · NeoPixel · OLED · Weather · Visualization · Bell Jar · Diorama
Proof
On the shelf polling the weather right now

The Idea

A glass cloche on the desk that shows the weather happening somewhere else, right now.

Pick a city. The interior of the jar takes on that location's current sky color. Cloud cover dims and grays the light. The OLED panel reads out the sun or the moon, the moon's current phase, the temperature, the condition. Walk into the room at six in the evening Denver time and the jar might be at high noon Tokyo, or pre-dawn Reykjavík, or the full-moon middle of the night somewhere in the Andes.

Eventually: a humidifier to add moisture when it's overcast, a small fan that runs at the speed of the actual wind, a Peltier that pulls the air below dew point during precipitation so condensation forms on the glass for real. A bed of moss inside that gets to live in whichever climate you've pointed the system at. The plant inside the jar is in another country.

Phase 1 (built)

The visual layer works.

  • ESP32 DevKit V1 running the loop
  • 24-LED NeoPixel ring for the sky color, brightness capped at 20% so it reads as ambient lighting and not as a flashlight
  • 1.3" SSD1306 OLED (128×64) for the icon dashboard. Sun is a clean filled disc; moon is rendered as a rectangle plus an ellipse so the terminator curve looks right at every phase, including clean half-discs at first and last quarter
  • Color palette tuned through the day: night, dawn, morning, day, afternoon, dusk, with intermediate anchors so transitions go gold instead of pink
  • Cloud wash blends the base sky color toward overcast gray proportional to the cloud-cover percentage

Snapshot data is currently hardcoded. The system runs the right palette for the right time, but the data is one moment frozen.

Phase 2 (next)

Live data via Open-Meteo. WiFi to the public weather API (no auth needed, free, returns everything we want), poll every five minutes, re-render every two-tenths of a second between polls so the time tick stays smooth and sky transitions are continuous. Seven-letter weather codes from the API map cleanly to the visual layer.

Phases 3 through 10 (planned, in order)

  1. Humidifier control when it's cloudy or raining at the source location. Invisible moisture into the chamber.
  2. Fan control with PWM speed proportional to wind speed at the source. Off at zero, full at twenty-five plus.
  3. Peltier control during precipitation. Cold side faces the chamber, hot side dumps heat through the base. Real condensation on the inside of the glass.
  4. Pepper's Ghost OLED mounted at an angle inside the jar so the sun or moon appears to float in the air, rather than being read off the bottom panel.
  5. Custom base under the cloche. Wet zone (jar interior) and dry zone (electronics) sealed apart. Drip management for the Peltier cold plate.
  6. Sound. Wind ambience volume that tracks wind speed. Rain loop on rain codes. Thunder claps plus an LED flash on thunderstorm codes. Birdsong at dawn. Crickets at night.
  7. Selectable cities. A small interface to pick the source location. Tokyo, Santa Fe, anywhere with coordinates.
  8. The diorama. Moss, a tiny mountain, a bed of soil. The plant inside the jar lives in whichever climate it's currently being shown.

Why The Form

It's a glass case for a phenomenon, not for an object. The phenomenon is the weather happening somewhere else right now. The case lets you walk past it and see, at a glance, what kind of day someone you know is having on the other side of the planet. Or what kind of day a place you used to live is having without you.

A weather app does this in pixels. The cloche does it in actual humidity, actual temperature drop, actual wind on the leaves of the moss. The point is to make the data physical.

Pairs With Climate Cases

The cloche is the personal-scale single-vitrine version. Climate Cases is the public-installation scaled vision: a row of cloches, each holding a real plot of source-location land, lining a corridor at an airport. Same instinct, place is conditions, not coordinates, different scale. The cloche is built; Climate Cases is concept.

Honest Known Issues

  • Condensation will be the enemy. Bell jar plus humidifier plus Peltier equals micro cloud chamber. Electronics need to be sealed below the deck or vented out, not living inside the jar.
  • Pepper's Ghost needs a dark backdrop. The reflected image only floats convincingly with nothing visually busy behind the angled glass.
  • Power budget jumps fast. LEDs and OLED on USB are fine. Add the Peltier and we're at twelve-volt brick territory. The smaller TEC1-12703 (about 30 watts) is the sane scale for a jar this size.
  • The clone OLED has a column-leakage glitch on the right edge, typical "132-column controller behind a 128-column window" issue. Cosmetic, fixable in software by restricting the draw area.

Status

Phase 1 functional. Phase 2 next, blocked only on WiFi credentials. Bell jar and base hardware ordered. Roadmap through phase 10 mapped. Built; not finished.