The Shard is located in London and, at 310 metres (95 storeys), is the tallest building in the European Union. The price of apartments and condos in the building reflect the views they give across the UK capital and are rumoured to crest at $80 million for a two-floor penthouse.

A tourist trip to the top of the Shard costs £24.95.

In order to tell whether the price of the trip is worth it, and to quantify whether the owner of such a penthouse is getting their money’s worth, Willem at The Secret Batcave has created a project to measure how cloudy the view is.

The project is called the Shard Rain Cam. It combines a Logitech 9000 webcam with a Raspberry Pi and a USB thumb drive (for storage) and uses Motion, Python and OpenCV to take pictures and then do analysis to determine how cloudy the day is. The Rain Cam captures a time-lapse set of images which are then analysed by OpenCV which works out the cloudiness.

Anyone can see the results by going to the hyper-catchy website www.whatcaniseefromtheshard.com. This website gives a qualitative statement of whether the tourist fee of £25 is worth it. Right now, it says “Quite far, but not 25 quid far” which I had to chuckle at.