Describe your prototypes here...

I thought it'd be fun to have a thread where people describe their current projects. It'd be a good opportunity for people to ask questions about components, design, bugs and the various issues you encounter when building stuff.



I will go first:



I get the Luas to and from work every day. It’s a 6 minute walk from my office to the Luas stop and I finish quite late so by the time I'm going home, the Luas only runs every 15/16 minutes. A few times I've been 400 metres from the stop, could see the Luas coming but couldn't run to the stop in time and so had to wait another 16 minutes in the rain for the next one. Not fun. Transdev have a website with Real Time Information where you can select the stop you are interested in and it will display the countdown to the next Luas at that stop. So, I am building my creatively titles Luas-clock. It’s a 16x2 LCD screen, and I am writing a web scraper in Python to read off the number of minutes to my next Luas which it will display on the screen.



I'm still on version 1 which is a Raspberry Pi 2 with a breadboard connecting to the GPIO. Version 2 will be more professional looking with a shield for the wiring, and version 3 will incorporate a 3G modem so I can access the internet in work.



I'm still working on the code for the scraper. I think the transdev site has been designed to prevent scraping so it's not straightforward. I have lots of experience writing scrapers so I don't foresee a problem.

ozmo

denartha wrote: »

... I am writing a web scraper in Python to read off the number of minutes to my next Luas which it will display on the screen...

Cool -

Irish rail have an API you can freely use instead of scraping.

http://api.irishrail.ie/realtime/