The MakeJo Blog

Let's see how we can use a NodeMCU ESP8266 board to fetch METARs and TAFs from the internet, and display them on a small OLED screen.

You don't need to be familiar with ESP8266 or aviation weather to complete this project, we will quickly review what they do and how to connect the hardware and software together to build this thing.

What is an ESP8266

We won't go into too much details but the ESP8266 is an inexpensive microchip with WiFi capabilities.
NodeMCU provides an open source firmware we can use to easily program the ESP8266 chip.
NodeMCU also provide an open design for a development board allowing us to easily connect the ESP8266 chip to a computer and other electronic components. Since the design is open, many manufacturers make and sell clones of this development board.

What are METAR and TAF?

METAR and TAF are a format of abbreviated weather information used by pilots.

Because of their abbreviated format, METARs and TAFs contains very few letters but provide a lot of useful information such as wind, visibility, clouds, temperature, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and more.

We won't discuss the meaning of each abbreviation since it's not the goal of this post but if you want to learn more you can visit this website to fetch and decode aviation weather. All you need to provide the airport ICAO code (for example "KLAX" or "LFPG").

The parts used

Here is the list of parts used to complete this project:

• (1) NodeMCU ESP8266 development board ($6.50). Any equivalent board based on NodeMCU ESP8266 open hardware design will do.
• (1) 0.96" 128x64 OLED display with SSD1306 driver ($6.99). Again, there's many equivalent online that will work just as well as this one.
• (1) Small enclosure case for NodeMCU ESP8266 and 0.96" OLED display. You can download the design for free and print
• (1) Micro USB cable

Note: On the display I used, the first two lines are yellow and the next 6 lines are blue. Your display may be different but the code will work exactly the same.