This was wonderful. Extremely hackery. I did skim the last half, because it’s largely code.

I really enjoyed this read. I've been wanting to tackle a side project that uses old hardware and this has been inspiring!

I also didn't know that skia had rust bindings and it seemed pretty easy to setup.

It's been a nightmare to try setup in c++.

Nice! Much more sophisticated than my Raspi Zero version from 7 years ago [1].

[1] https://github.com/Scarysize/transit-pi

Haven't finished reading yet but a transport version of a bloomberg terminal would be great.

If anything goes wrong with a train journey I find it useful to have as much information as possible.

I always want to get into rust but examples like this always make me reconsider. Every time I want to code something and start with rust, I switch to python 5 minutes later because it’s just so much easier (for me at least). The code to build exactly this dashboard would probably be less than 100 lines of python. Rust is much better for performance (and maybe runtime correctness, but most errors here would be parser errors anyways) of course, but for this application, I don’t think it really matters.

“where are you and where are you going?” Is a delusional question for a transit system but it’s a good question for Uber.

When I was involved with the Green Party we were thinking of “just doing” the things the local government wasn’t doing and I think we set a fire under the bus company’s butt to fix a large number of usability problems that we were going to fix for them (and stick our logo everywhere.)

The bus company was very negative on us extracting schedules from their web site because they wanted to see what people were searching for — hypothetically they could have added new service somewhere if there was demand for it but (1) it seemed hard to believe they’d really do it because changes are so infrequent and (2) they never showed any sign of caring what people thought, why would they start now?

BART's on a takt now though. so you just have to memorize like 3 times for your local station

Yeah, i wish more programs worked like this.

I wrote something similar on a smaller scale for the keihin-kyuukou line in japan: https://rail.esrh.me. Now I live in tokyo and there's several transit options closeby so I would love to have some always on display like this in my room.

Unfortunately, while public transit in the US and Europe seem to be tracked by services with developer friendly APIs, this is not the case in Japan as far as i know -- not that much of a problem back then, i just needed to do some light web scraping.

I wrote all of the scraping/data and processing/frontend code in clojure and clojurescript, and wrote a small blog post about it here: https://esrh.me/posts/2023-03-23-clojure