This website is under construction.
GTFS stands for the General Transit Feed Specification. Its basically a standard for public transportation information provided by agencies for devs to make their whatnot work its provided as static and real-time feeds (in protobuf đŸ˜”), I took it upon myself to give it a shot and learn how GTFS works and the cooperation of the static and real-time to provide useful information to the end user which is the commuter. My project here was to make a timetable out of a stop from any TransLink stop in South East Queensland, If I could get a proper feasible efficient end result, the goal would now be to run it standalone on a Raspberry Pi and a display. I started ugly with my console based program which kickstarted the project.
Program fully functional, console based
This is what future prototypes are based on, I must admit I kinda cheated here by figuring out TransLink's API urls that they show for the Journey Planner website but it was a useable workable thing, and plus I didn't have to go through the whole Static and Real-time process thing!! (Peak laziness) Anyways, the information is meant to appeal toward an enthusiast (if you couldn't tell, i am one :3) showing the vehicle/run number, route, destination, time, the general areas of where this route will serve and the current location of the service in relation of the stop that is set in the script.
The second prototype worked on pygame, the code of the first prototype is pretty much untouched, but all the departures are shown here in this table which a real life PIDS would have looked like, unfortunately, the animations that pygame provide, is not feasible to run on every computer, especially a Raspberry Pi. It was very choppy when a departure came in or left the screen, sometimes taking 10s of seconds to move when there are multiple moving at the same time.
WebView departure board on a browser
When the problem of compatibility arose, I thought that a WebView application would be most practical for the end product, and I made the right choice. Everything was made much more efficient than the pygame program, this would definitely run on the Raspberry Pi, CSS allowed me to make smooth animations.
Combined with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the WebView solution proved much more practical than pygame in making a random timetable thing to eventually work on a Raspberry Pi natively.
My next steps here is to move this WebView application onto the Raspberry Pi running standalone with this timetable. I will update this section if i do go forward with it.
Everything, is defined by the GTFS standard which allow great compatibility, no matter if the timetable is a bus, ferry, train or tram stop.
Service alerts from the Stop API is also shown if there is any for the configured stop
Find out what vehicle is serving your desired service! This will show any real time data on what vehicle has been assigned to that particular service.
Users can easily configure the departure board as it syncs with the "stops.txt" in the GTFS dataset the Government gives out as part of their Open Data.
Also, text-to-speech is an option if the user wishes to enable it. It will announce all arrivals and what time the service will arrive.
Now, you are able to test out the departure board for yourself!