OpenRoadCode Weather Dashboard

The Weather dashboard is a standalone Streamlit frontend for cached Open-Meteo forecast data. CarUi can launch it from the Weather screen, but the dashboard remains independently runnable.

Architecture

The dashboard contains presentation logic only. Weather retrieval and persistence live under controllers/weather, with atomic byte storage supplied by controllers/cache.

CarUi background worker
        |
        v
OpenMeteoWeatherController
        |
        v
WeatherSnapshotCache -> PersistentCache
        |
        v
~/.cache/openroadcode/weather
        |
        v
Streamlit Weather dashboard

After CarUi becomes ready, it can warm the Streamlit server and refresh the weather snapshot in daemon workers. Opening the dashboard then renders the cached snapshot before any stale-data refresh is needed.

Location selection

CarUi selects weather coordinates in this order:

1. A live GPSD fix.
2. A recent last-known position from the configured position cache.
3. The weather controller’s configured fallback coordinates.

Reverse geocoding is intentionally excluded from the launch path. GPS and last-known locations are displayed as coordinates, avoiding a slow external lookup and allowing startup when that service is unavailable.

Freshness and offline behavior

The default weather freshness interval is 120 seconds. When cached data is fresh, the dashboard performs no forecast request. When it is stale, the controller requests Open-Meteo data and atomically replaces the snapshot.

If a refresh fails and an older snapshot exists, the dashboard renders the last successful forecast and retains its original update time. If no cached snapshot exists, the initial dashboard session must retrieve one before it can render weather data.

CarUi configuration

Enable the dashboard and background server warm-up in config/runtime.toml:

[auxiliary.weather_dashboard]
enabled = true
preload = true

The dashboard browser uses runtime.auxiliary_display, which defaults to :0. Override the display for one CarUi launch with:

CARUI_AUXILIARY_DISPLAY=:2 venv/bin/python -m apps.carUi.main

The last-known position used by Weather is configured separately:

[position_cache]
enabled = true
directory = "~/.cache/openroadcode/position"
max_age_seconds = 604800

Standalone launch

From the repository root:

venv/bin/streamlit run apps/weatherDash/main.py \
  --server.headless true \
  --server.port 8501

Alternatively:

apps/weatherDash/run_weather_dash.sh

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8501.

The standalone dashboard uses these optional environment variables:

When run without CarUi, the first session refreshes the snapshot itself. A subsequent launch can reuse the persisted data.

Logs

CarUi-managed processes write to:

~/.cache/openroadcode/tmp/weather-dashboard.log
~/.cache/openroadcode/tmp/weather-dashboard-browser.log

Dependencies

The dashboard requires Streamlit, streamlit-autorefresh, and Requests. CarUi launches it with the active Python environment, so dependencies should be installed into the same environment used to run OpenRoadCode.