Realtime BART Arrival Display
filbot.com
filbot.com
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.
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.
I'm generally one of those people who is always warm, so with that caveat inmind I don't find -10 to be too difficult. I can travel to the office, or shops and back with jeans, t-shirt a hat and a decent jacket.
It's only when things get colder than -15 or so that I need gloves, a scarf, and more layers. That's the kinda temperature where your face starts to hurt when you're outdoors, and daily life gets unpleasant. You start to think "Maybe I'll go to the shop tomorrow", and plan things so that you don't have to go outdoors like that.
You and me both! Here in Canada it can easily reach -30 and I go out with tank tops. I have a theory that if you can control your inner temperature, you won't feel cold, so it's an intrinsic thing. Although some of my colleagues exploited this when we used to go to the field to fly and test drones during harsh winter, they would bring up that theory to me to be outside while they were cozying up in the car!
Once you’ve had a few weeks of that, you only need a little jacket at -20c.
Yukon, Canada.
It’s all relative.
The coldest I ever went walking in was -48c just below the arctic circle in November, not counting wind chill. I’ve also hung out in +48C a couple of times. Still hoping I can get a hundred degree temperature swing.
(It hasn't been -20 degrees here since records began.)
Growing up in the middle of Canada, I heard about schools closing due to weather, but ours only closed if it was below -40C.
In the UK, either in Scotland where I lived as an adult, or Yorkshire where I grew up snow was something that lasted for a few hours most of the time, and so people weren't used to it. If it snowed enough that the roads were covered busses would be cancelled, trains wouldn't run, and schools would be closed.
If it ever drops below 0C close to the equator (and near sea level) pipes should be drained and everyone do without water - this happens so rarely that it isn't worth the cost to figure out how to handle that. When you live in a place where it goes below 0C for weeks on end every winter that isn't acceptable and so you have to pay the extra costs of putting pipes inside buildings (or far underground) and insulating and heating those buildings to keep the pipes warm.
https://medium.com/data-science/the-inspection-paradox-is-ev...
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.
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
It runs on an ESP32-S3 using the government provided open data. https://opentransportdata.swiss
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.
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.
Well done and what a lovely spirit.
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.
Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips
Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?
In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.
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.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1osvbhn/mini_bart_re...