jpribyl

This sounds epic! How did you handle powering the devices at night / rainy days? A battery presumably.. but seems like that would seriously up the maintenance cost.

You would have to replace the batteries fairly regularly and I have a feeling that without funding anything I cowboy rig would be super flaky.

2007 means that the network would probably have been an issue as well. Though, I’m less worried about that these days.

Ha! I should have specified, I’m in the US- I think it’s a large number of factors that ultimately boil down to “there’s no incentive to be accurate” our buses are often 15-30 minutes late.

I don’t think this is very typical, but I have even had a bus driver stop mid route, say “this is as far as I’m going today”, kick everybody off, and drive away

The problem I’ve faced is that the official live update arrival times are often wrong.

I’ve fantasized for years about engineering a network of self contained + solar powered microcontroller / camera units that I could place on top of bus stops to track them myself.

Then again, by the time I get around to it the official arrival times will likely have become more reliable.

Any rate, great write up- thanks for sharing!