SBB departure board
A creative solution for never having to wait for the train out in the cold.
At my job at Öko-Job in Liestal I needed something that would tell me when a delivery person had dropped something off. I ordered a pile of parts and built a system with ESP boards that detects whether a door is open. It isn’t listed on this site because I accidentally lost the source code, for now at least.
After many, many nights working on these boards, and a lot of waiting for late trains in the blistering cold, I had an idea: why not have a little display that warns me when my train is late? I always forget to check, but I’d definitely notice a red block on a screen.
So I built the SBB board. It’s an ESP32 with a small colour screen that pulls live departures from the Swiss public transport OpenData API and shows the next four, sorted by time. A green box means the train is on time, a red one means it’s more than a minute late, with the delay in minutes. I can filter by destination and line, so it only shows what I actually take, and at night it dims itself. It used to freeze now and then, so I added a watchdog that restarts it whenever it hangs.