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This post is the first in a series that will walk through a complete embedded application design using Storyboard for the user interface component.
The product goal is to design and implement a home weather station. Like any commercial product, it will evolve from a general concept to specific software and hardware implementations. During the evolution we'll talk about how Storyboard can help to keep the development going, even in the face of software or hardware uncertainty.
Weather Station Concept Design
The weather station that we want to build is designed to be a wall or counter mounted unit containing an integrated LCD touchscreen display. It will communicate with several locally[1] connected probes to measure temperature, barometer, wind speed and direction changes.
An additional feature that we would like to incorporate would be the ability to provide access to long term forecasts using online weather services.
This is the initial product, but our design should accommodate a future evolution that could use the online weather services to offer remote weather information as well as satellite imagery.
As a reference, we really like the design of uControl's home security and automation panels:
The display size we would like to use is 800x480, but the final selection will be dictated by the market price point. We also do not have a particular hardware platform or operating system configuration selected, but expect that our mythical engineering and procurement team will be evaluating those to figure out where we get the best value so that we can introduce the weather station product at a competitive price point.
Next time we'll lay out the general product components and architecture and incorporate our peripheral devices into that design.
Thomas
[1] In this case local doesn't mean that we will necessarily have wired inputs, but that the information is gathered locally. It may be that the implementation uses a wired, wireless or combination of approaches.