This is an odd step for me. Planning a project, drawing each piece, designing the schematic, and then actually ordering parts and building it. Usually I stop short of actually ordering anything. Hard to beat the price of the ESP8266 though.

I've drawn out the icon, revised, revised, redrawn, redrawn, and finally I think I've got a decent icon that is compact enough to be a clean design, but still has all the essentials to give a good read of the various weather conditions possible. I'm using black matte board as the mask. Without anything so fancy as a laser cutter, a trusty x-acto suits me just fine.

The first layer of the display will be a sheet of glass. I'm still searching for the best treatment for the glass. As much as possible I would like the segments of the icon to not be visible unless they are currently lighted. The best thing would be heavy window tint or even a 2-way mirror. So far though, I've not been able to find either in a form or price point suitable for this project.

Behind the glass will be the icon mask and then a sheet of vellum to help diffuse the LEDs. Behind that is another matte board mask to separate sections from each other. The final layer will be foam core board which will hold the LEDs in place. Circuit boards will be mounted on the back of the foam board, and the whole thing placed in a black frame.

So, currently I have the icon mask and the light mask cut, and the ESP-12E kit from ebay has come in, so I have that assembled. I've ordered a TLC5940 to drive the LEDs, but I'm concerned it may not be so easy to drive from the ESP8266. I probably should have looked for a PWM driver that doesn't have such specific clock requirements. I suppose if it comes to it, I can always throw in an AVR to handle the display, and let the ESP sleep whenever it's not pulling data.