Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

news.ycombinator.com

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#791
post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, small world :-) Agreed on timing, it could be better. I'll consider skipping some of the words + make them appear slower. Thanks for the suggestion!

BUS 55 - DANS - 5MIN ?

AUTOBUS - DANS - 5 - MINUTES

I think that makes sense, yeah. I would rather not flash other digits (55) as that could be confusing for someone who sees that number go by (was that the bus number or the number of minutes?)

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#792
post #784

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

blinks ouch, perhaps it's just my colour-blindness, but just fyi I can't read your site at all unless I highlight the text. Awesome public service with the Pi bus times though, love it!

I sincerely apologize, I just relaunched my site and did not take that into consideration. I’ll definitely revisit this. Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#793

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

In China, they can get these bus message on a smartphone at mostly main city. The app would show the bus location and predict the time bus would reach according to the traffic status graphically.

We get this in the US in most major cities as well. But sometimes you don’t want to deal with smartphones and apps with bad UI developed by Fortune 500 firms for regional transit authorities, you just wish there would be a simple sign next to the stop that gave you 2 pieces of information: “BUS X IN Y MINUTES”.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#794

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

really cool project man, props! bit strange they don't do this ,but i suppose Canada is A LOT larger than my country so perhaps it's harder to roll out decent services in all places :D very nice stuff though! the most annoying thing in the world to me is waiting on something without a clear indication of when the wait will end so you are doing a big big service to these poor people :D

Thanks! Some bus stations in Montreal do have small digital signs announcing the next departures. I’m sure those devices cost a bit of money and need to be serviced, so it makes sense that not all stations get them. (All stations do have a paper schedule which is neat, but isn’t real time info..!)

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#795

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

If the buses have GPS then Montreal should launch an app. They did that here where I live and now everyone can see where each bus is, live, on a map of the city. Best thing ever for us control freaks.

The transit authority did have an app, which they’ve pulled at some point (as far as I understand, they felt like they couldn’t compete with the level of transit info apps out there — which isn’t untrue). There’s also the Transit app [0] that is made in Montreal, so I guess that they (the transit authority) were happy to shine a light on that (pretty great) app.

In any case, one of the neat things about the Pi sign is that it works for everyone (whether you have a phone or not), and is part of the urban landscape. You can use your phone for more important things, or just leave it alone a few minutes while you wait. :)

[0] https://transitapp.com/

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome work and thank you for doing this for public without asking. P.S. does the transit authority offer an API or is this prone to breaking when they change their page layout? [edit: I just read about the rumor on your webpage. Clarifies.]

If you use MITMProxy or Charles you can easily intercept the traffic on 99% of all iPhone/Android apps (bit harder if pinned-sertificate). These API’s are often stable because a lot of users don’t update their apps that often.

For newer android apps this is no longer true. By default, apps only trust system CA's. User added System CA's are not trusted by apps. I believe only the browser uses the user added CA's.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#797
I've built a mobile airpollution sensor together with a few other parents and their kids at my 8-year old son's primary school in London. Air pollution is a big topic as the school is right next to a busy road, a lot of children are suffering from asthma and Islington has been pretty useless in collecting/publishing data. So we've started taking things in our own hands and built a handful of raspberry pi based monitors in class rooms, the playground and children take it with them on their school run. geo-tagged data is automatically uploaded to little influxdb/grafana based web service wheneve the pi has a wifi connection. Makes it an interesting project for kids to look and interpret charts and stuff as well. Currently we're measuring PM2.5/PM10, temp and humidity only, haven't had the time yet to look into NOx sensors yet...

https://github.com/bstiel/airpollutionpi

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#800
post #756

At one point, I figured I wanted some lighting for my bar, which consists of about 70 bottles on shelves (about 1.2m wide and 2m height). But a simple on/off is not good enough. Instead, I went with individually addressable LEDs (NeoPixels strips to be exact), and developped my own back-end to manage those LEDs, with a simple front-end. So far, it supports lighting bottles individually, by category (rum, vodka etc...…

That sounds super cool, I'd love to see some pictures if you have any!
Post reply on HN