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There is something strangely calming about looking at the departure board at a train station. Maybe it’s the pixelated glow of the lights, the regularly rotating stream of information, or the knowledge that you’re about to sit back and let the rails take you to your destination. Unfortunately, that specific type of living room aesthetic is usually only found in the seasons themselves.
Not content to leave it at that, DIY YouTuber Jon Morris Smith recently designed a homemade version of a tee box. The end result is also not a great but useless replica. With a little coding work, Smith configured his LED matrix to display all the information from his own trips.
Raspberry Pi Breakout Board
“As I have always been a fan of trains, I have always wanted to have my own departure board and, as a regular user, one that shows my usual route,” he wrote on his website, Another Partial Success.
As Smith looked at pre-made dot matrix LED displays for sale, they were either too expensive for his taste or required a subscription fee to use.
“My thought: How hard can it be? And here we are,” he added.
As with so many DIY electronics projects, Smith’s train display relies on a 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 which is then connected to a matrix board and four 128-by-64-pixel LED arrays. All equipment runs on a 5 volt 5 amp power supply to ensure stable display on the screens. From there, it’s simply a matter of configuring the Raspberry Pi 4 to run the appropriate programs, including custom breakout board software, and subscribing to the Rail Data Marketplace for real-time information.
However, there is a caveat to Smith’s available version. Rail Data Marketplace is a UK-based service, so it will not be able to provide you with any information about trains for the United States. That said, it will probably just take some adjustments using a national option on a website like Train Tracking to fix the problem. And even if you don’t use it to track your next departure time, it’s still a great accessory to enjoy at home.
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