Realtime BART Arrival Display

I love how long the terrible speech synthesis on BART lasted. I don't mean this in a negative way at all. BART was so state of the art when it was built, that it still feels like the future today. They did a good job on ... everything.

Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.

Symbiote• 8 months ago

Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips, so I'm surprised BART chose this synthesized system. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3hheSml3Q

inferiorhuman3• 8 months ago

  They did a good job on ... everything.

Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now.

  Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go
  find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.

BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309

p0w3n3d• 8 months ago

In my case my nostalgia is tied to the bubbly incoherent voice that says (in astonishingly clear manner) what train arrives first and then proceeds to say which platform and which track, which is so indistinguishable that you never know where to run to (before we had BARTs in the underground passage we used to check all the platforms, because there might have been a change)

schoen2• 8 months ago

When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.

derwiki• 8 months ago

When was Noisebridge new? I started going around 2010/11

dddw• 8 months ago

An idea well executed! tips hat

BoredPositron• 8 months ago

Love it and I am glad the data is available to make little projects like this. You need to work with more heat or wetting when soldering though.

zkmon• 8 months ago

Cool project and very nicely done!! claps.

You know what, I used to plan my leaving from home based on the timings at the station, but soon I realized that it is not worth it. It is not because trains are not sticking to the time table. Just randomly starting at your own comfort eliminates the anxiety that comes with planning. Your average wait time might increase to half of the interval between the trains, but that would be an increase of only a few minutes for mornings, in return for never bothering to check time again.

lanyard-textile• 8 months ago

Agreed. It’s honestly not that long of a wait at most stations.

stevekemp3• 8 months ago

I built a small hardware device to show the departure time of the tram next to my house, because here in Finland it gets cold in winter.

Mostly the winter isn't super-cold, something like -10°C/14°F, but there are weeks where it will be -20°C/-4°F and then there's a big difference between waiting at the tram stop for 1 minute or 7 minutes.

circuit10• 8 months ago

As someone who lives in England seeing -10C described as “not super cold” is interesting, I guess perception of these things varies a lot depending on where you live and how prepared you are

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

Here, if it's -10 degrees, then the tram probably won't be working anyway; Ireland tends to take that sort of extreme temperature as a license to shut down _absolutely everything_.

(It hasn't been -20 degrees here since records began.)

rsynnott3• 8 months ago

I look when getting a bus/train if the frequency is less than ~one every ten minutes. I never look for trams (those are ~always headway <10 mins for the routes I use).

bluGill2• 8 months ago

Different people have different thresholds. some go as high as 12. it is generally excepted that until you get to 7 most people are checking the schedule before leaving the door. there is noticable bumbs in ridership down to 5 minutes (not always enough to pay for the costs of that much service) so that should be the goal if a system can do it.

jmkd• 8 months ago

Quick note your average wait time might increase to more than half the interval, thanks to the Waiting Time Paradox, a transportation manifestation of the Inspection Paradox.

https://medium.com/data-science/the-inspection-paradox-is-ev...

logifail• 8 months ago

You know what, I used to plan my leaving from home based on the timings at the station, but soon I realized that it is not worth it.

I would be interested to know how the service frequency affects this approach.

A nearby regional train line I sometimes use has a service every 30 minutes, and - for me at least - that (in)frequency makes it definitely worth timing your arrival at the station.

paradox460• 8 months ago

I discovered the same. I found that I actually preferred mornings where I just missed the BART train, and had a few minutes to sit down, relax, do some SSR flashcards on my phone, read a bit of a book, or just center myself.

Some of the older BART stations are hauntingly beautiful. South San Francisco has a near cathedral like atmosphere, with extremely high ceilings, and if you sit there quietly you can hear the pigeons softly cooing to each other

ThrowawayTestr• 8 months ago

Very cute, I love it.

velvet_thunderr• 8 months ago

This is such a cool thing you've built! Must add a super cool vibe to the room too!

RoryH• 8 months ago

Thank you for the inspiration from your nice and simple real-time API. I made a pass a few years ago on digesting similar GTFS data and you've made me realise how much simpler it could be! :-)

ljsprague• 8 months ago

How are you hiding the cable in the last photo or is it battery powered?

voxadam• 8 months ago

They're running a USB-C cable through the wall behind, down thought the wall, to a power brick below.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1osvbhn/mini_bart_re...

sdoering• 8 months ago

Those are the projects I love and get inspired by. I love the execution and the level of detail, making it feel like a true miniature signage on the station.

Well done and what a lovely spirit.

johnnyApplePRNG• 8 months ago

Amazing. I want one. Keep up the great work!

K0balt• 8 months ago

Nice execution, I think you nailed the vibe. Nice find on that display, it’s awesome!

If you wanted to get rid of your middleware and maybe pick up some insight, one of the things that SOTA LLMs are really good at is translating code from one language into another.

The ESP has plenty of moxie to handle the API work, so you could try translating it for the ESP, then you could drop the weight of your middleware service. I use LLMs that way when I feel roadblocked (usually laziness more than anything lol) and I’m often surprised at how much I learn from the implementation.

Just an idea, it’s fine as it is.

inferiorhuman3• 8 months ago

Not everything needs AI slop.

Worse, predatory AI companies mean that vendors like DigiKey, Mouser, Farnell/Newark/Element14, and McMaster-Carr have to hide their sites behind anti-bot services. In practical terms that means you can expect to have to "click and hold" some stupid button for upwards of fifteen seconds just to access a page on the DigiKey site. Or maybe you'll just be flat out denied access to Farnell's catalog because you don't seem human enough.

Externalizing the costs of your cute little short cut tools has very real negative consequences for the maker community.

jones89176• 8 months ago

What's that "NUDES" sign in the background?

drob518• 8 months ago

Very cool and well executed. I love the vibe and commitment to detail.

sschueller• 8 months ago

Very cool, I built a colored one for Swiss transit (https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...) and turned it into a product: https://www.stationdisplay.com

It runs on an ESP32-S3 using the government provided open data. https://opentransportdata.swiss

ProllyInfamous• 8 months ago

Is my conversion ratio incorrect: ~1449CHF == $1800USD?

mlmonkey• 8 months ago

I knew Switzerland was expensive, but not _THAT_ expensive!! :-D

https://www.google.com/search?q=CHF+1%2C449.00+in+USD

JCM9• 8 months ago

Nice job! I love these sort of projects.

uoaei• 8 months ago

Cool project. Everyone else has made good comments. If I could add a little criticism I felt your "and then I added a computer because I didn't want to write the ESP32 code for interacting with the API" did substantially change the character of the project and felt a bit like a rug-pull vs the promise of the first sections of the post.

zhobbs• 8 months ago

Awesome project. When I read the display I hear a very specific voice in my head calling out the arrival times!

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309

jacktheturtle• 8 months ago

this is great. I've wanted to build something similar for the trains outside of my flat. I have not been able to find reliable apis for this

Realtime BART Arrival Display

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