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.
I 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.
As 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
I 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.
> I'm generally one of those people who is always warm
You and me both! Here in Canada it can easily reach -30 and I go out with tank tops. I have a theory that if you can control your inner temperature, you won't feel cold, so it's an intrinsic thing. Although some of my colleagues exploited this when we used to go to the field to fly and test drones during harsh winter, they would bring up that theory to me to be outside while they were cozying up in the car!
Once you’ve had a few weeks of that, you only need a little jacket at -20c.
Yukon, Canada.
It’s all relative.
The coldest I ever went walking in was -48c just below the arctic circle in November, not counting wind chill. I’ve also hung out in +48C a couple of times. Still hoping I can get a hundred degree temperature swing.
Here, if it's -10 degrees, then the tram probably won't be working anyway; Ireland tends to take that sort of extreme temperature as a license to shut down _absolutely everything_.
(It hasn't been -20 degrees here since records began.)
I think it's largely a matter of how regular these events are. Finnish winters are universally cold, with lots of snow. So car-owners switch to winter-tyres in advance of snow/ice, trams always work, and suchlike.
In the UK, either in Scotland where I lived as an adult, or Yorkshire where I grew up snow was something that lasted for a few hours most of the time, and so people weren't used to it. If it snowed enough that the roads were covered busses would be cancelled, trains wouldn't run, and schools would be closed.
That is my conclusion too. When something is rare it isn't worth preparing for it when you can shut down. When something is common you have to prepare for it.
If it ever drops below 0C close to the equator (and near sea level) pipes should be drained and everyone do without water - this happens so rarely that it isn't worth the cost to figure out how to handle that. When you live in a place where it goes below 0C for weeks on end every winter that isn't acceptable and so you have to pay the extra costs of putting pipes inside buildings (or far underground) and insulating and heating those buildings to keep the pipes warm.
Quick note your average wait time might increase to more than half the interval, thanks to the Waiting Time Paradox, a transportation manifestation of the Inspection Paradox.
I discovered the same. I found that I actually preferred mornings where I just missed the BART train, and had a few minutes to sit down, relax, do some SSR flashcards on my phone, read a bit of a book, or just center myself.
Some of the older BART stations are hauntingly beautiful. South San Francisco has a near cathedral like atmosphere, with extremely high ceilings, and if you sit there quietly you can hear the pigeons softly cooing to each other
I look when getting a bus/train if the frequency is less than ~one every ten minutes. I never look for trams (those are ~always headway <10 mins for the routes I use).
Different people have different thresholds. some go as high as 12. it is generally excepted that until you get to 7 most people are checking the schedule before leaving the door. there is noticable bumbs in ridership down to 5 minutes (not always enough to pay for the costs of that much service) so that should be the goal if a system can do it.
> 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.
I would be interested to know how the service frequency affects this approach.
A nearby regional train line I sometimes use has a service every 30 minutes, and - for me at least - that (in)frequency makes it definitely worth timing your arrival at the station.
Nice 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.
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.
Those 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.
Cool 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.
When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.
In 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)
I 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.
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.
Trains 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?
Trains 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.
Thank 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! :-)
Cool 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.
I 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.
As 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
I 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.
> I'm generally one of those people who is always warm
You and me both! Here in Canada it can easily reach -30 and I go out with tank tops. I have a theory that if you can control your inner temperature, you won't feel cold, so it's an intrinsic thing. Although some of my colleagues exploited this when we used to go to the field to fly and test drones during harsh winter, they would bring up that theory to me to be outside while they were cozying up in the car!
I used to regularly ride my bike to work at -40C.
Once you’ve had a few weeks of that, you only need a little jacket at -20c.
Yukon, Canada.
It’s all relative.
The coldest I ever went walking in was -48c just below the arctic circle in November, not counting wind chill. I’ve also hung out in +48C a couple of times. Still hoping I can get a hundred degree temperature swing.
Here, if it's -10 degrees, then the tram probably won't be working anyway; Ireland tends to take that sort of extreme temperature as a license to shut down _absolutely everything_.
(It hasn't been -20 degrees here since records began.)
It’s funny how different countries handle this differently.
Growing up in the middle of Canada, I heard about schools closing due to weather, but ours only closed if it was below -40C.
I think it's largely a matter of how regular these events are. Finnish winters are universally cold, with lots of snow. So car-owners switch to winter-tyres in advance of snow/ice, trams always work, and suchlike.
In the UK, either in Scotland where I lived as an adult, or Yorkshire where I grew up snow was something that lasted for a few hours most of the time, and so people weren't used to it. If it snowed enough that the roads were covered busses would be cancelled, trains wouldn't run, and schools would be closed.
That is my conclusion too. When something is rare it isn't worth preparing for it when you can shut down. When something is common you have to prepare for it.
If it ever drops below 0C close to the equator (and near sea level) pipes should be drained and everyone do without water - this happens so rarely that it isn't worth the cost to figure out how to handle that. When you live in a place where it goes below 0C for weeks on end every winter that isn't acceptable and so you have to pay the extra costs of putting pipes inside buildings (or far underground) and insulating and heating those buildings to keep the pipes warm.
Quick note your average wait time might increase to more than half the interval, thanks to the Waiting Time Paradox, a transportation manifestation of the Inspection Paradox.
https://medium.com/data-science/the-inspection-paradox-is-ev...
I discovered the same. I found that I actually preferred mornings where I just missed the BART train, and had a few minutes to sit down, relax, do some SSR flashcards on my phone, read a bit of a book, or just center myself.
Some of the older BART stations are hauntingly beautiful. South San Francisco has a near cathedral like atmosphere, with extremely high ceilings, and if you sit there quietly you can hear the pigeons softly cooing to each other
I look when getting a bus/train if the frequency is less than ~one every ten minutes. I never look for trams (those are ~always headway <10 mins for the routes I use).
Different people have different thresholds. some go as high as 12. it is generally excepted that until you get to 7 most people are checking the schedule before leaving the door. there is noticable bumbs in ridership down to 5 minutes (not always enough to pay for the costs of that much service) so that should be the goal if a system can do it.
Ah, didn't realise there was actual data on this, though I suppose it makes sense that there would be.
> 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.
I would be interested to know how the service frequency affects this approach.
A nearby regional train line I sometimes use has a service every 30 minutes, and - for me at least - that (in)frequency makes it definitely worth timing your arrival at the station.
Agreed. It’s honestly not that long of a wait at most stations.
Very cool, I built a colored one for Swiss transit (https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...) and turned it into a product: https://www.stationdisplay.com
It runs on an ESP32-S3 using the government provided open data. https://opentransportdata.swiss
Is my conversion ratio incorrect: ~1449CHF == $1800USD?
I knew Switzerland was expensive, but not _THAT_ expensive!! :-D
https://www.google.com/search?q=CHF+1%2C449.00+in+USD
Nice 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.
Not 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.
Those 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.
Cool 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.
Awesome 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
Cool! Hey I have a feature request: Could you add the robotic voices?
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.
When was Noisebridge new? I started going around 2010/11
About 2008.
In 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)
I 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.
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
Trains 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
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.
This is such a cool thing you've built! Must add a super cool vibe to the room too!
Thank 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! :-)
How are you hiding the cable in the last photo or is it battery powered?
They'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_re...
Love 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.
Very cool and well executed. I love the vibe and commitment to detail.
What's that "NUDES" sign in the background?
this 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
Amazing. I want one. Keep up the great work!
Nice job! I love these sort of projects.
An idea well executed! tips hat
This should be a commercial product.
BART has a really good merch store. They should totally sell this on there: https://www.railgoods.com/
There a similar one, but it's the Swiss public transport system: https://tramli.ch/
i had to look it up: Vienna too https://straba.at/
I love that they are also imitating the real sign desing just like OP.
What a great thing you built!
Very cute, I love it.
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