Train/Bus departures board

#21

Thats the deathly silence that falls on the space in the early hours of the morning

#22

Has anyone noticed if the trains are quieter?

#23

should they be?

#24

Are they?

#25

When the Network Rail surveyor visited last year, he noticed that the front pair of tracks are much louder than the back. This is due to the ballast being loose, allowing the rails to flex as each wheel goes over. You could tell by the way the phase 2 trains go rumble rumble but the phase 1 trains go kachunk kachunk. In theory, NR should fix the problem, because it knackers the rails and trains.

#26

So. What noise so they make now?

#27

Dermot is alluding to the fact that the track ballast above the arch was tamped the Sunday before last. However, I have not noticed a reduction in noise since then, unfortunately. The loudest passage of a train I have heard has been since then, as it happens, but it did seem to be going particularly fast.

#28

Where did we get this from? Just wondering how much they cost? Do they have a particular name other than ‘train departure board’?

#29

It was given to us by a hotel in London, I have no idea but it’s an Alpha Spectrum 4200.

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#30

Holy thread resurrection, batman !

I’ve got a pretty old Phillips monitor going spare - and we have a dearth of Pi’s apparently. I’m also mucking about with National Rail and Trackernet APIs. I’m hoping I can make a thing that’ll work out what the train that’s currently going overhead is going.

But - was thinking a slightly more graphically endowed dashboard might be nice, maybe with recent discourse topics, upcoming events etc. As well as last trains and stuff.

Could also use it to welcome / announce (not neccecarily audibly … Just text) people when they come through the door ?

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#31

There is the led announcement board in he space somewhere that needs some kind of love.

#32

It’s not even that hard to interface with IIRC.

#33

A live departures from Herne Hill would be great for those of us who hop on a train home :slight_smile:

#34

I suspect it’s just a serial connection of some variety.

What I was thinking was a web page sort of thing which might be a bit easier on the eye. We could of course do both :smiley:

#35

Here’s the start of some code

Mainly because I needed something to learn how to do Promises in javascript :smiley:

Uses the Live Departures Boards API, and Countdown for busses. It’s not no UI yet.

#36

For Promise look into this http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/getting-started.html

It’s explained here the benefit
http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/why-promises.html

In short native Promise have the tendency of swallowing error and bluebird make it much easier to deal with that on top of many other things

tips: make sure you do npm install --save module-name or npm install --save-dev module-name when adding npm module to your app otherwise your package.json is getting out of sync with the dependencies you use in the source

Hope this help a bit :slight_smile:

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#37

Thanks!
(turns out I forgot to do --save when I npm install’d request - thanks for prompting!)

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#38

'ello, i’ve had similar plans for a pretty Makerspace display for a while. my prime motivation is mugshots and inspiring project / space images from our Flickr. i’m perennially over-stretched, so it’s good to see someone doing something. it would be good to meet and have a chat about this, as collaborating would be good, and it’s not my normal toolchain (ie. if it were this we’d have had it from day one).

#39

Also: that LED display is f’ugly.

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#40

One more things that is pretty useful when creating a simple express webapp is to use the express generator it does a lot of things for you :slight_smile:

https://expressjs.com/en/starter/generator.html