Cryoscope Forecasts The Weather In The Easiest Way Possible

Each morning when my seven-year-old daughter wakes up, the first thing she asks me is how cold it's going to be. If I tell her a specific number like 50°, she looks at me as if I asked her to solve an algebra equation. The next thing out of her mouth is, "do I need a jacket or not?" That's all she really wants to know; weather from a child's perspective can be distilled three basic things – shorts or pants or jacket. I think a lot of us are like that when it comes to the weather.

I would love to have this little gadget called the Cryoscope. It would be the perfect thing for letting a little kid figure out exactly what they need to wear on any given day. The Cryoscope is a cool little DIY gadget that was created by a guy named Robb Godshaw, who is an industrial design student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The device is impressively simple in its construction with only a few parts that anybody familiar with computers will recognize.

The Cryoscope uses a solid little cube, a peltier element, heat sink, cooling fan, and RGB LED. An Arduino controller operates all of those parts. The controller receives the weather temperature data from an app that operates on the web. The way it works is incredibly simple, the controller either allows the aluminum cube to heat up or cool down. The hot or cold temperature created is passed to a simple metal cube that sits over the top of all the parts. All you need to do to know what the temperature is going to be like is simply walk up and place your hand on the outer aluminum cube, and you can feel what the weather will be like. Check out the video to get a better idea about how the thing works.

[via CNET]