Scuba Diving weather conditions dashboard

This scuba diving dashboard was built for fun using the Web API plugin to give a clear view of conditions in Portland Harbour, England, to show just how much you can do in SquaredUp.

Ben Heymink

Director of Cloud Engineering, SquaredUp

Dashboard preview

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Challenge

Scuba diving is a personal hobby of mine and I enjoy getting out for a dive. But I need to stay safe (and I prefer to eat my sandwiches on the beach in good weather).

To make sure the conditions are right, I usually have to tab between multiple websites to get all the information I need. It takes time and there isn’t one place I can go for all the information I want on my preferred location – Portland Harbour in Dorset. That means it’s harder to plan dives in advance as I can’t constantly monitor the conditions.

Solution

I built myself a SquaredUp dashboard using the Web API plugin to pull weather and tidal data from multiple sources into one place so I can always spot when the conditions are coming together for a good dive.

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Dashboard walk-through

Across the top I have WebAPI tiles that pull data from weatherfile.com and openweathermap.org to give me a deep dive into the current wind conditions. If it’s too windy, the sea will be too rough to take the boat out.

I used a gauge tile on the dashboard to show the wind speed, and a metric for the direction. Next to those, I’ve included a line graph to show the minimum, maximum, and average wind speeds to check for wind variables.

The weather summary in a couple of words using the text tile provides insight into conditions, and the temperature tile lets me know how warm or cold my lunch on the beach will be!

You’ll also notice the orange dot to the top left of some tiles. I’m using monitoring on a couple of the tiles to give my dashboard a health status as well. If the wind speed is too high or the temp too low, those tiles will change the status of the dashboard.

At the bottom of the dashboard you can see a map – which uses the image tile – to show the tidal directions outside Portland Harbour. Alongside that is the line graph pulling data from ADMIRALTY EasyTide with the tide times and height predictions so I can time my dive for optimal conditions.

In the future...

My next dashboard upgrade would include live webcam footage of the harbour (would need a video tile for that!) and a table of upcoming events in Portland Harbour that I may need to be aware of.