My Chumby transit widget
I just got a Chumby, primarily to let me create this widget to run on it: it’s a clock that displays predictions of when the Portland Streetcar will be passing the stops nearest my home. Green dots are northbound; red are southbound. Armed with this, I know exactly when I need to leave the house to avoid a long wait.
(I wrote this using OpenLaszlo – I started with a “clock” demo of theirs, and added some dots and a bit of data retrieval. Click here for this widget in its own window.)
Ah, so Chumby is based on Flash? I was hoping for a more JavaScript-y platform.
Comment by Reid — Monday, October 15, 2007 @ 11:20 am
Hey coolio! I like the term ‘predictions’. Your streetcars must be as ‘predictable’ as ours…
Of course, now you have to soup it up to allow it to predict streetcars in other locations.
Comment by P T Withington — Monday, October 15, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
Hi Reid – yeah, their whole model seems to center around building a community of shared Flash-movie “widgets”, but if you don’t like that, you’re free to do your own thing: it’s a very open little Linux box (ARM-based; lots of cool gizmos built in, including a motion sensor, microphone, speakers.. and that’s a touchscreen on the front!).
Hi P.T. – Portland’s Streetcars get monitoring by NextBus (http://www.nextbus.com), which provides live in-vehicle monitoring for many transit systems… so the predictions are pretty good! (All the Streetcar stops have LED signs with the same next-arrival information, and the NextBus website is Treo-friendly, so I never look at paper schedules.) My little OpenLaszlo app polls a service running on my home webserver that uses a couple of hard-coded bus-stop codes when it polls NextBus. I haven’t attempted to make that service too general, since (a) I only care about the two stops closest to home, and (b) I don’t want to hammer NextBus’s servers enough that I come up on their radar.
Comment by stearns — Monday, October 15, 2007 @ 5:51 pm