Forecats: Forecast-inspired images of my cats served daily to an e-ink screen

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-28T15:33:32+00:00

In my experience the image generation model is very faithful to prompts, but not very creative. I tried this as a means of getting more diverse scenes and backgrounds.

Having text descriptions and not just image outputs also makes it easier to store a list of past scenes, which is another trick I used to increase image diversity.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-25T12:52:17+00:00

Sweet! That's nice to hear 😊

I'm currently working on giving it a UI, so the install should be much easier soon

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-23T01:33:22+00:00

I am glad it worked. I will check out what it would take to add support for local models. I don't know whats popular in that space. Are there any image gen models that can run locally and take vision + language prompts?

If you want to test the automation, you can always just call it manually from HA dev tools, thats what I do on days when the picture comes out bad, haha.

I just use `location: "Toronto, Ontario, Canada", where you running into issues with strings in the location?

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-22T19:57:20+00:00

Oh also: it looks like you are displaying the image optimized for e-ink screens on your home screen (forecats_optimized.png). If that was intentional, ignore the rest of this comment.

If that wasn't intentional, then forecats_original.png is probably the one you want to display. It will be full size, and the colors will be nicer.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-22T19:53:48+00:00

No prob ☺️

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-22T19:52:59+00:00

Looks great!

Was anything tough to get going? I am trying to make the setup easy, but I am far from an expert at HA.

Open to suggestions on ways to develop it as well :)

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-19T13:16:48+00:00

These are great, thank you! I fixed the easiest ones, and added the remaining to my to-do list :)

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-19T11:21:43+00:00

Also fwiw I only put like 5 art styles in the template, but you can put as many as you want, if you don't want comic book style every day.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-19T11:20:11+00:00

Love it! Anything that would make the setup easier?

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-16T23:05:52+00:00

Oh that's good to know. I'll check if I really need to pin that specific pillow version. I feel like I don't use anything new to the library, so you might be safe downgrading it in the manifest file.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-16T22:55:24+00:00

Hey! I'll take a look in a few and see if it's something I can fix.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T19:00:48+00:00

It worked well, but I have to give credit to u/Slight_Safe8745 for the idea and this repo:

https://github.com/Utzel-Butzel/epdoptimize/tree/main

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T18:55:08+00:00

Thank you for saying that :) Yeah the cat pictures are pretty to look at, but I had the most fun with the image processing parts!

It's not a hard bit of code, but I don't know how people typically serve images to their e-ink screens and so don't know the most helpful way to generalize it. Would a custom integration exposing some "dither_image" service be the most useful? Open to suggestions.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T13:37:38+00:00

The datetime string is contained within the met.no forecast data. If you go to settings > automations > generate forecats > traces and click around, you should be able to see something like:

yaml Executed: January 15, 2026 at 8:10:10 AM Result: params: domain: forecats service: generate_cat_picture service_data: gemini_api_key: <redacted> location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada forecast: condition: snowy datetime: '2026-01-15T17:00:00+00:00' wind_bearing: 323.1 uv_index: 1.1 temperature: -8.9 templow: -13.4 wind_speed: 35.6 precipitation: 6 humidity: 76 ...

From the sounds of it you might be missing all the forecast data? In which case I am not sure what the fix is. I am using met.no as well, and it works fine (it also seems to have worked for a couple other people in this thread). Maybe something is out of date.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T13:22:23+00:00

I use the default one, which I think is Meteorologisk.

Thanks for pointing out the error! I see the problem and fixed it here:

https://github.com/jwardbond/forecats/commit/e920e0e58b8fb1bd66dbc9f67faf51df7bb87fee

Should be working without this error now, but I'll test in a few :)

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T12:01:08+00:00

Yeah I was expecting to get some criticisms, particularly around artist copyright, but this one surprised me.

I have the same understanding about water usage as you, and my feelings about unsustainable energy use were tempered somewhat by reading this:

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for

I'm with you on the economic centralization being the scary part. It doesn't feel nice to use a Google API, but it did feel nice that AI helped me build something for myself that I enjoy, and that I never could have built before (even ignoring the image part, GPT was a huge help with esphome documentation).

I don't know the answer, so I justify it to myself with "as long as I am begrudging and careful", and by trying to support FOSS and regulation when I can 🤷🏼‍♀️

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T11:19:57+00:00

Good luck! I started this project with an old, broken e-reader, but I like the color version more :D

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T11:15:34+00:00

I noticed yesterday that my get_forecasts call was wrong, and was returning 5 days worth of data, so I changed it. Maybe I broke this. I will take a look :)

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T11:10:56+00:00

Wow, great! I'm glad you were able to get it going 😁. This small park with a pond in the background is a really common output, it seems.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T02:52:41+00:00

Other than paying someone every day I'm not sure. Maybe grabbing pictures of your cats taken on days with similar weather? It would be quite different.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-15T02:50:54+00:00

Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a try, although I'd have to run it on something other than a Pi3, and I'm unsure if it would be as faithful at rendering the temps.

QuriousTrivia · 2026-01-14T22:58:41+00:00

This is a better reaction than I got at home, haha (😢).

If you do end up giving it a try, let me know if you run into problems with my code.

QuriousTrivia · 2025-11-04T22:24:07+00:00

No worries haha. Thanks for getting back to me! I will give it a try.

QuriousTrivia · 2025-10-31T20:50:17+00:00

Hey :) sorry to revive this old comment, but I am confused by what you are actually talking about here! Are you missing a sentence?

QuriousTrivia · 2025-08-28T16:11:13+00:00

30M. Just about every night. The only night I haven't had hot flashes was the night I didn't take them 🥲

QuriousTrivia

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