7 ms·
Realtime BART Arrival Display
- jacktheturtle 11mo agothis is great. I've wanted to build something similar for the trains outside of my flat. I have not been able to find reliable apis for this
- kleiba 11mo agoThis should be a commercial product.
- jo-m 11mo agoThere a similar one, but it's the Swiss public transport system: https://tramli.ch/ https://tramli.ch/
- croisillon 11mo agoi had to look it up: Vienna too https://straba.at/ https://straba.at/
- FinnKuhn 11mo agoI love that they are also imitating the real sign desing just like OP.
- spankalee 11mo agoBART has a really good merch store. They should totally sell this on there: https://www.railgoods.com/ https://www.railgoods.com/
- marinhero 11mo agoWhat a great thing you built!
- rafaele 11mo agoCool! Hey I have a feature request: Could you add the robotic voices? https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
- p0w3n3d 11mo agoIn my case my nostalgia is tied to the bubbly incoherent voice that says (in astonishingly clear manner) what train arrives first and then proceeds to say which platform and which track, which is so indistinguishable that you never know where to run to (before we had BARTs in the underground passage we used to check all the platforms, because there might have been a change)
- jrockway 11mo agoI love how long the terrible speech synthesis on BART lasted. I don't mean this in a negative way at all. BART was so state of the art when it was built, that it still feels like the future today. They did a good job on ... everything. Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.
- Symbiote 11mo agoTrains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips, so I'm surprised BART chose this synthesized system. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings? https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3hheSml3Q https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3hheSml3Q
- inferiorhuman 11mo agoTrains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips BART did too. I think the announcements date back to the early days of BART. The computerized text-to-speech didn't come around until 2000 and only cover train arrivals. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings? BART's always gone for style over substance, so yeah that probably played a part in it. There's a small chance that text-to-speech was cheaper than paying a human. In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.
- inferiorhuman 11mo agoThey did a good job on ... everything. Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now. Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for. BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains. https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
- dddw 11mo agoAn idea well executed! tips hat
- BoredPositron 11mo agoLove it and I am glad the data is available to make little projects like this. You need to work with more heat or wetting when soldering though.
- zkmon 11mo agoCool project and very nicely done!! claps. You know what, I used to plan my leaving from home based on the timings at the station, but soon I realized that it is not worth it. It is not because trains are not sticking to the time table. Just randomly starting at your own comfort eliminates the anxiety that comes with planning. Your average wait time might increase to half of the interval between the trains, but that would be an increase of only a few minutes for mornings, in return for never bothering to check time again.
- lanyard-textile 11mo agoAgreed. It’s honestly not that long of a wait at most stations.
- stevekemp 11mo agoI built a small hardware device to show the departure time of the tram next to my house, because here in Finland it gets cold in winter. Mostly the winter isn't super-cold, something like -10°C/14°F, but there are weeks where it will be -20°C/-4°F and then there's a big difference between waiting at the tram stop for 1 minute or 7 minutes.
- circuit10 11mo agoAs someone who lives in England seeing -10C described as “not super cold” is interesting, I guess perception of these things varies a lot depending on where you live and how prepared you are
- stevekemp 11mo agoI moved from Scotland to Finland, so I guess I'm familiar with the UK temperatures ranges! I'm generally one of those people who is always warm, so with that caveat inmind I don't find -10 to be too difficult. I can travel to the office, or shops and back with jeans, t-shirt a hat and a decent jacket. It's only when things get colder than -15 or so that I need gloves, a scarf, and more layers. That's the kinda temperature where your face starts to hurt when you're outdoors, and daily life gets unpleasant. You start to think "Maybe I'll go to the shop tomorrow", and plan things so that you don't have to go outdoors like that.
- markhale 11mo ago[dead]
- ThrowawayTestr 11mo agoVery cute, I love it.
- velvet_thunderr 11mo agoThis is such a cool thing you've built! Must add a super cool vibe to the room too!
- RoryH 11mo agoThank you for the inspiration from your nice and simple real-time API. I made a pass a few years ago on digesting similar GTFS data and you've made me realise how much simpler it could be! :-)
- ljsprague 11mo agoHow are you hiding the cable in the last photo or is it battery powered?
- voxadam 11mo agoThey're running a USB-C cable through the wall behind, down thought the wall, to a power brick below. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1osvbhn/mini_bart_realtime_arrival_display/no0fw0z/ https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1osvbhn/mini_bart_re...
- sdoering 11mo agoThose are the projects I love and get inspired by. I love the execution and the level of detail, making it feel like a true miniature signage on the station. Well done and what a lovely spirit.
- johnnyApplePRNG 11mo agoAmazing. I want one. Keep up the great work!
- K0balt 11mo agoNice execution, I think you nailed the vibe. Nice find on that display, it’s awesome! If you wanted to get rid of your middleware and maybe pick up some insight, one of the things that SOTA LLMs are really good at is translating code from one language into another. The ESP has plenty of moxie to handle the API work, so you could try translating it for the ESP, then you could drop the weight of your middleware service. I use LLMs that way when I feel roadblocked (usually laziness more than anything lol) and I’m often surprised at how much I learn from the implementation. Just an idea, it’s fine as it is.
- inferiorhuman 11mo agoNot everything needs AI slop. Worse, predatory AI companies mean that vendors like DigiKey, Mouser, Farnell/Newark/Element14, and McMaster-Carr have to hide their sites behind anti-bot services. In practical terms that means you can expect to have to "click and hold" some stupid button for upwards of fifteen seconds just to access a page on the DigiKey site. Or maybe you'll just be flat out denied access to Farnell's catalog because you don't seem human enough. Externalizing the costs of your cute little short cut tools has very real negative consequences for the maker community.
- jones89176 11mo agoWhat's that "NUDES" sign in the background?
- drob518 11mo agoVery cool and well executed. I love the vibe and commitment to detail.
- sschueller 11mo agoVery cool, I built a colored one for Swiss transit (https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-product/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...) and turned it into a product: https://www.stationdisplay.com https://www.stationdisplay.com It runs on an ESP32-S3 using the government provided open data. https://opentransportdata.swiss https://opentransportdata.swiss
- ProllyInfamous 11mo agoIs my conversion ratio incorrect: ~1449CHF == $1800USD?
- mlmonkey 11mo agoI knew Switzerland was expensive, but not _THAT_ expensive!! :-D https://www.google.com/search?q=CHF+1%2C449.00+in+USD https://www.google.com/search?q=CHF+1%2C449.00+in+USD
- JCM9 11mo agoNice job! I love these sort of projects.
- uoaei 11mo agoCool project. Everyone else has made good comments. If I could add a little criticism I felt your "and then I added a computer because I didn't want to write the ESP32 code for interacting with the API" did substantially change the character of the project and felt a bit like a rug-pull vs the promise of the first sections of the post.
- zhobbs 11mo agoAwesome project. When I read the display I hear a very specific voice in my head calling out the arrival times! https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]