Awesome! I 'acquired' the bus sign and a pedestrian walk/don't walk light for this project. I can put together a simple relay controller to drive the sign, and bring it back into the shop. It would probably be nice to have a sign that displays which route the current bus is on; I also have a loaner flipdot display that could be re-purposed for this. Any designs on which computer/embedded thing to run this on? It could potentially be a cloud-based service that is polled by a dumb client, in a similar manner to the LED sign.
Loving the multi-layered approach for making these projects :-) Cheers, Matt On 10/12/2010 04:26 PM, Matthew Beckler wrote:
I know that someone mentioned that we have a bus stop sign hanging out in the shop, with the grand idea to have it light up or otherwise indicate when a bus is coming soon. I suppose the first step towards that is figuring out how to get that data, so this afternoon I took a snack break and got something working. There is a website called RouteShout that parses the General Transit Feed Spec (GTFS)[0] feed that transit agencies publish so Google can provide transit info on google maps. RouteShout provides an easy and useful web API around that data (http://www.routeshout.com/main/api) that is pretty slick. I registered for an API key, and wrote a chunk of python to do what we need. There is lots of info available, but all we really need to do is to "Get a list of upcoming stops for a specific agency and stop (within next 2 hours)". For my key, the PA, and the HackPGH bus stop on Jumonville at Watson, this is the url to fetch: http://api.routeshout.com/rs.stops.getTimes ?key=361099f484000362836fca4cc320085d &agency=paac &stop=E33040 The API call returns a "webpage" that looks something like this, slightly trimmed: { "response": { "timezone": "America/New_York", "times": [ { "type": "scheduled", "arrival_time": "03:49 PM", "departure_time": "03:49 PM", "route_short_name": "71D", "route_long_name": "HAMILTON - VIA OAKLAND-SHADYSIDE-5TH AV - OR" }, { "type":"scheduled", "arrival_time":"03:50 PM", "departure_time":"03:50 PM", "route_short_name":"71C", "route_long_name":"POINT BREEZE - VIA OAKLAND-SHADYSIDE-CENTRE AV - OR" }, ... ] } "status": "ok" } I wrote a little bit of python to fetch and parse this data, giving us results like this: matthew@broderick$ ./get_stop_data.py Status: ok Timezone: America/New_York 04:16 PM 71A NEGLEY - VIA OAKLAND-SHADYSIDE-CENTRE AV - OR 04:17 PM 500 HIGHLAND PK - DOWNTOWN-OAKLAND-ZOO - OA 04:20 PM 71D HAMILTON - VIA OAKLAND-SHADYSIDE-5TH AV - OR Seems like this is a good first step towards getting some sort of bus alert system going. I'll go ahead and add this information and my script to the wiki. Thanks, Matthew [0] http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html
