Never miss a powder-day again.
Snow Scraper is a tiny, desk‑friendly dashboard that scrapes your favorite ski hills for overnight totals, base depth, and weekly snowfall—then lights up and plays a musical alarm when it dumps. It’s the stoke signal you can actually see and hear.
What it does
A tiny snow‑intel station that keeps your wax hot and your excuses cold.
Scrapes popular resorts
Pulls new-snow, weekly totals, and base depth from multiple ski hills using the Snow Plow backend, and shows it all on a crisp 320×240 display.
Powder‑day alarms
Set an overnight threshold (e.g., 10–15 cm). If it dumps, a musical buzzer anthem plays while an LED ring bursts to life.
LED snow meter
A luminous LED ring maps snowfall to color—sparkle mode kicks in for big‑pow mornings (>20 cm) because joy deserves glitter.
Reliable & headless
Runs on a Pi Zero 2 W. A watchdog keeps the app healthy and boots into the app automatically on startup. Entirely plug & play.
Simple config
Easily set alarms and swap hills on‑device without touching code. Update the software to the newest version with a single click.
Maker‑friendly
Open‑source Python 3.9; uses requests, bs4, Pillow, luma.lcd, neopixel, and friends. Built using readily available parts. Hack away.
The Skier’s Dream Tool
Every skier and snowboarder knows the morning dilemma: roll over and sleep in, or get up and chase the mountain? The difference between a good day and a legendary one often comes down to one thing—snowfall. Snow Scraper was built to make that decision easy.
Set it on your nightstand, and it becomes your personal snow concierge. Each morning, its bright LCD screen shows you exactly how much snow fell at your favorite resort—overnight, this week, and on the base. No phones, no scrolling, no waiting for web pages to load. Just a clean, simple answer.
But the real magic is the powder alarm. Tell Snow Scraper your threshold—5 cm, 10 cm, 20 cm—and when the mountain delivers, you’ll know. The buzzer kicks in with the Powder Day Anthem, LEDs flash and sparkle with excitement, and you’re out of bed grabbing your gear. It’s more than an alert, it’s a ritual: the call to shred.
Snow Scraper doesn’t just track snow; it logs history, checks avalanche conditions, and keeps itself updated. It’s always on, always ready, always tuned to the mountains. For skiers and riders who live for the first tracks, it’s not just a gadget—it’s your edge, your motivator, your powder-day guarantee.
How it works
Scrape → display → alert → ride.
Python scrapers pull resort totals on an hourly schedule to store on the Snow Scraper.
The GUI paints crisp stats, the LED lights up colors based on the fresh snow.
When the conditions are met, the buzzer belts a powder anthem.
Grab your gear and shred.
Gallery
Actual Screenshots From The Display
Build yours
Every great DIY project starts with a spark—an itch to solve a problem in your own way. For skiers and riders, the problem is simple: how do you know, without fuss, if the mountain just got blanketed in fresh snow? That spark turned into Snow Scraper, a project that’s as much fun to build as it is to use.
At its heart, Snow Scraper is a Raspberry Pi adventure. You’ll wire up a touchscreen, calibrate the touch controls, connect a buzzer, and light up addressable LEDs. You’ll dive into Python code that scrapes snowfall data from real ski resort websites, parses it, and puts it on your screen. You’ll configure an alarm system that doesn’t just beep—it sings the Powder Day Anthem when your chosen snow threshold is met.
Along the way, you’ll pick up practical maker skills: GPIO control, web scraping, JSON logging, and soldering. And the best part? It’s all open-source, so you can add your own ideas—maybe different alarms, more resorts, or even something completely unique!
The journey is the reward here. By the time you’ve finished building your Snow Scraper, you won’t just have a powder-day predictor—you’ll have a device that you understand inside and out, because you made it. And nothing feels quite like that.
Tech specs
- SBC: Raspberry Pi 2W
- Processor: Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1GHz
- RAM: 512MB of SDRAM
- Network: 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN
- Language: Python 3.9
- Display: 320×240 ili9341 (SPI via luma.lcd)
- LEDs: WS2812 7‑pixel ring (neopixel)
- Audio: passive buzzer module
- Configs: JSON (
*.conf) - Daemon: systemd + python‑daemon watchdog
- Power: Supplied by 5V 2.5A micro-usb
FAQ
Quick answers. Deep snow. Minimal tab-refreshing.
What exactly is Snow Scraper?
Snow Scraper is a small, desk-friendly device that automatically collects live snow data from popular ski resorts and displays it in real time -- no refreshing tabs, no apps to open.
Where does the snow data come from?
Snow Scraper is powered by the Snow Plow backend, which continuously gathers and processes real-time resort snow reports, base depths, and recent totals.
How often does the data update?
Data updates regularly throughout the day, depending on each resort's reporting schedule. When a mountain updates its numbers, Snow Scraper follows shortly after.
Do I need a phone or subscription?
No phone. No subscription. Once connected to Wi-Fi, Snow Scraper runs on its own and just... works.
Which resorts are supported?
Snow Scraper focuses on major Western Canadian resorts, with support expanding over time. The live Snow Plow dashboard shows the full, current resort list.
Is this official resort data?
Yes -- Snow Plow pulls data directly from publicly available resort snow reports and presents it in a consistent, easy-to-compare format.
What's the difference between Snow Scraper and Snow Plow?
Snow Scraper is the physical device.
Snow Plow is the live web command center behind it -- maps, comparisons, and broader snow context. They use the same data, just shown in different ways.
Does Snow Scraper keep working if the website changes?
That's the idea. Snow Plow is actively maintained, monitored, and updated so Snow Scraper devices stay reliable even as resort websites evolve.
Is Snow Scraper open source or hackable?
Snow Scraper is maker-friendly by design. Advanced users can explore the build, configuration, and data flow -- it's built to be understood, not locked down.
Will this replace checking resort websites entirely?
Think of it as your always-on snow pulse. It won't replace deep digging, but it's perfect for quick decisions, storm watching, and staying snow-aware at a glance.
Made for early alarms and first chairs
The universe is cold and chaotic; we bring order with tiny joyful gadgets. Build one, and may your mornings be deep and your lines untracked.
