![\"TransitClock1\"](\"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/TransitClock1.jpg\")
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I take a bus from home several days a week, commuting to work or heading out for the evening. Each time, I check my phone dozens of times to leave the house at just the right time and\u00a0minimize waiting at the bus stop. Other times it would be nice to have a general idea well ahead of time; instead of waiting\u00a0till I’m ready, check my Transit<\/a> app, and finding out I\u00a0just missed the bus and need to wait 40 minutes for the next one.<\/p>\n I bought a Raspberry PI Zero over the winter and had an idea to attach it to a small display and display departure times for each of my busses. Never wanting to reinvent the wheel, I searched for similar projects. I found this over-the-top LED matrix scroller<\/a> over on Adafruit that would still take some work to use a cheaper graphical display instead. Then I found a much simpler solution: Phillip Burgess posted a followup Adafruit project that was just what I was looking for, the Personalized NextBus ESP8266 Transit Clock<\/a>.<\/p>\n This made an excellent weekend project, I customized some of the Arduino code and display effects in less than an hour. It uses Adafruit’s amazingly affordable and simple Huzzah board<\/a> with built-in WiFi to connect to my network and check bus times from NextBus<\/a>. It then sends the remaining minutes to\u00a07-segment LED displays<\/a> with easy-to control I2C controllers. I printed a regular sheet of paper to label the buses (and also diffuse the LEDs), mounted everything into cardboard cutouts, and packed it into an Ikea 5×7″ Ribba frame.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The thick frame can stand freely on a table or hang on a wall. The controller just plugs into any USB plug for power (or I can sneak a USB battery behind it). I think it turned out great!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, if only someone would make an app for the Apple Watch that did\u00a0the same thing,\u00a0showing arrival times for several stops of my choosing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I take a bus from home several days a week, commuting to work or heading out for the evening. Each time, I check my phone dozens of times to leave the house at just the right time and\u00a0minimize waiting at the bus stop. Other times it would be nice to have a general idea well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"TransitClock3\"](\"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/TransitClock3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"TransitClock2\"](\"http:\/\/www.jwardell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/TransitClock2.jpg\")
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