A thing that tells you when the next buses are.
When the button is pressed, it fetches data from Metz bus network website and displays the next two arrivals for a particular line at a given stop. Four seven-segment displays and two LEDs, mounted on a custom PCB, are controlled by the GPIO of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The code is written in Python 3 and uses the Requests and lxml libraries to scrape the data.
Press the button to fetch data. An animation is displayed while the device is waiting for the website to respond. The number of minutes for the next two buses are displayed on the front. A LED below each number indicates if the bus is "on-demand". To turn the device off, press the button for three seconds. Once the LED of the Raspberry Pi turns off, you can safely unplug the device.
Use Raspberry Pi Imager to create a Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) on a MicroSD card. Before writing the image, go to the Advanced options and change the following settings :
- Change the hostname to busdisplay.
- Check Enable SSH. You can leave the option to use password authentication checked.
- Leave the default username as pi and choose a password.
- Check Configure wifi and type in your SSID and wifi password. Change the country to FR.
- Check Set locale settings and change the time zone to Europe/Paris
Write the image on the SD card, then insert the card into the Raspberry Pi and power it on.
Connect to the Raspberry Pi using SSH
ssh pi@busdisplay
When asked, enter the the password you chose when making the image.
Next, update the system and install git and pip
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git pip
Clone this repository and install the required libraries
git clone https://github.com/GhettoBastler/BusDisplay.git
sudo pip install -r BusDisplay/requirements.txt
Copy the service file and enable it to run the program at startup
Note: the service file contains the full path to main.py. If you are not using the default username (pi) and/or if you cloned the repository into another location, change the content of BusDisplay.service accordingly.
sudo cp BusDisplay/BusDisplay.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable BusDisplay
Restart the Raspberry Pi
sudo reboot
If everything went right, every LED of the display should flash once during start up. After that, pressing the button will fetch data for the METTIS A line at République station.
To use another bus line/stop, you need LE MET's internal number for your station and line.
Go to https://services.lemet.fr/ and search for your bus line on the left pannel
Next, click on your stop in the timetable. You will be redirected to another page.
Connect to the Raspberry Pi using SSH and edit the file config.py. Change the values for the ones that appears in the URL
ssh pi@busdisplay
nano BusDisplay/config.py
Restart the service
sudo systemctl restart BusDisplay
This project uses four SUNLED XDMR20A-1 seven-segment displays I scavenged from an old appliance. These may be hard to source, so I would advise redesigning the PCB and front panel for the parts you can find using the included schematics and SVG files.
Other components used for the circuits include:
- 9 100 ohm resistors
- 2 yellow LEDs
- A momentary push button that can fit a 12mm diameter hole (I used the R18-25B)
- A 2x20 connector with a ribbon cable for connecting the board to the Raspberry Pi
The laser cut enclosure should be made from a 5mm thick material. The assembly requires 9 M2.5x15 bolts. Spacers for the Pi and the PCB are also laser cut.
This project is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPLv3 license.