The Wiinstrument
Gosu
As I live in Berlin and student tickets are cheap, I have no need for a car and use only public transport for getting from A to B. The only problem is that I can't remember the departure times of all those trains and buses...
Saturday at about 5 p.m. I decided that I really needed a fancy, realtime-updated display with the departure times of the nearby bus and S-Bahn railway stations. A few hours of hacking later (and 15 minutes today for assembling) everything was finished :)
Now I won't miss my trains anymore at the station. And if it's delayed, I won't be too early at the station for nothing (the departure times are also correctly updated in this case).
Used tools: A milk-glass cabinet door from IKEA as table, An old G4 PowerBook, an old 15" TFT, (don't laugh) the MiniKidsGames framework (based on RubyCocoa), around 80 lines of Ruby code and some XML/XPath queries for parsing output from VBB online with the REXML library.
Comments (2)
This is such a cool nerdy project.
(btw the linkto the minikids framework is a bit messed up)
How about extending that into a nice planning tool for the trips around Berlin? Pick a location on a nice webinterface via GMaps and have it do the rest while you are getting ready (bathroom, breakfast - whatever). When you get back it shows you which bus/tram/train you have to take, when it leaves and where you have to get off.
Btw: whats the power intake for all that? I would think that a whole computer setup for sth that could easily be achieved through a printout might be a little costly ;)
Posted by robert | May 29, 2008 3:31 PM
Posted on May 29, 2008 15:31
I'm thinking about various extensions, like showing the outdoor temperature and forecast for the day.
Hmm, things like Google Maps would require a full keyboard connected to the notebook, as the screen is no touchscreen. We'll see :)
Energy cost is an issue, but you can use the computer e.g. as server at the same time, and the display has a nice feature: The monitor's power button is directly placed under the (flexible) milk glass, so you can switch it on and off by tapping on the display.
Posted by Sebastian Burkhart | May 29, 2008 7:59 PM
Posted on May 29, 2008 19:59