My Work

The name for this project comes from the name for the One Bus Away Application provided by the Open Transit Software Foundation and the nearby Durn Good Grocery Store. Living right by the bus stop to be able to get to campus means that theres even more incentive to not get to the stop early and spend as much time in the dry and warm confines of my house. This means I'll end up on the couch passing the time on my phone, but the problem is I have to open the OneBusAway app to be able to check the times, but I can forget to check it and miss the bus.

This spawned the idea of using a Raspberry Pi and a GPIO screen I found for cheap with an included case to display up-to-date information on the bus stop going towards campus, so I could quickly see the incoming busses while not having to open an app and wait for the stop info to load again. The GPIO screen had quite a few setup steps to it to calibrate and output video to the display. I will need to create some documentation to help a user that wants to emulate what I have done get set up.

I hadn't used electron before to build an application and so I wanted to attempt to use it to develop the app. It was a fun experience especially now that I have to learn how to configure and publish the app so that I can use it on the device. I am pretty happy with the simple design for the app and will probably not change it as adding complexity for a tiny screen will not help it's visibility.

I also have not tested the app on the Raspberry Pi's (Model 2 model B?) hardware so I have no idea how it will perform, but I somewhat hope that it won't be optimized, so that I can have a chance to mess with performance. I will probably try to do so anyway, but we will see once I publish the app and try to run it on the Pi.