A homebrewn weather app for Anthias in test use

Anthias Balena
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A weather page for Anthias on a slow internet connection

The built-in Anthias weather app didn’t work reliably for us; in the settings, the Openstreetmap did not show the map at all but a warning. We still wanted to have a weather shown to the customers, so we built a small weather page of our own.

The idea was simple: keep the graphics on the player (Raspberry Pi 5 4Gb + 32Gb SD), and only fetch the forecast over the internet.

We chose a small Python web service built with FastAPI. It looks up a Finnish postcode in a local file and uses the coordinates to fetch a forecast from MET Norway service. This way, one server can supply several screens, and each screen can show its own local weather.

To get it onto a player, we add a small weather service alongside Anthias, push the package to balenaCloud and assign the release to the player. Then we add a regular URL asset in Anthias, like http://weather-display:8765/00100. Just change the postcode and you change the forecast.

When that asset comes up in the playlist, the pictures are already on the player. It can show the last saved forecast while it checks for an update, even on a flaky connection.

i myself ain’t a coder so I used ChatGPT Plus subscription to wibe code the app. It took some changes as it was also my first program I’ve ever created. Currently the company I created this for has just two screens, which only one is using Anthias to display the images. However the overall corporation runs lots of restaurants around the area, so the potential is huge.

Have you done anything similar in your Anthias system?

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Hi @Northpole, thanks for sharing this, it’s a really neat setup. Keeping the graphics on the player and only pulling the forecast is a smart way to live with a slow connection, and serving every screen its own postcode from one small service will scale nicely across a restaurant group.

About the map in the built-in Weather app: I tried the location map in the Apps tab on our test devices running 2026.10.0 today and it loaded normally, so I couldn’t reproduce the warning yet. Could you share:

  • a screenshot of what you see instead of the map
  • which browser (and any privacy or ad-blocking extensions) you use to open the Anthias web interface
  • your Anthias version, shown on the System Info page

OpenStreetMap sometimes blocks map tiles for certain networks or strict privacy settings, and the screenshot will tell us whether that is what happened or if there is something for us to fix.

In the meantime, the map is optional. If you leave it alone, the Weather app works out the location by itself from the screen’s internet connection. You can also add it as a plain web page with your own coordinates, for example https://weather.srly.io/?lat=60.17&lng=24.94 for Helsinki.

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It may be that my router, which is blocking “ads” is affecting to the map.

Here-s my app from the backend site - the screen looks the same if you look at it with a mobile phone, as it’s designed to be viewed in portrait:

The Screenly Weather looks like this:

asset
asset720×858 50.8 KB

My Raspberry Pi 5 4Gb is running Anthias 26.10.0 on the latest BalenaOS.