richardhawthorn
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
19
Submissions
13
Member since
Oct 6
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 9 months ago
We switched to a matrix partly for price, partly for improved reliability.
Regular RGB LEDs are a lot cheaper than the WS2812, around 6x cheaper when we made the decision to switch, which adds up when you have 768 of them.
WS2812 LEDs are much easier to route, but if one dies then every LED routed after that one stops lighting up.
Comment · 9 months ago
Thanks, we've documented how some of our products work, where we get the data, the manufacturing process, and how to write/upload your own code to your board.
We should have a couple more technical posts released this year as we update the way our boards get their data.
Comment · 9 months ago
Hi everyone, Richard here, the creator of these traintrackr boards. It's great to see this on the front page!
I've been designing PCBs for years, and designed over 250 at last count.
We have a couple of products in the pipeline to come out this year, but I'd love to hear what you think we should build next.
Comment · 2 years ago
They recently increased their domain renewal pricing, and as others have said they don't make those prices very easy to find. I moved some .co.uk domains to them a couple of years ago and was surprised when my first bill came in. Their prices look ok for the first year but less so after that.
Having said that they are easy to use, and I've never had a problem managing my domains through them.
Comment · 3 years ago
1nce [0] and Hologram [1] offer low cost SIM cards for these type of applications.
1nce for example charges €10 for 500MB of data which lasts 10 years. Assuming you are economical with the data it's €1 a year, which is a very appealing price point. Even if you need 500MB a year that's still less than €1 a month.
Hologram charge by the MB (although I'm not sure exactly how much as their pricing page isn't fully transparent), with a 70¢ a month charge per SIM card. I think they offer a free SIM card with a certain amount of data a month free (maybe 1MB) if you just want 1 SIM card.
Comment · 6 years ago
The MTA have been behind other rapid transit networks when it comes to making their data available. You can get arrival prediction information on all stops/lines now through their API, but that wasn't the case until recently. They are still behind the Boston MBTA, where you can get vehicle locations in addition to arrival predictions, and TFL (London Underground) where they have a very well thought out API.
We use all these APIs to power our Traintrackr boards[0], processing the predicted arrival data (or departure data if they only provide that) to show trains moving through the network.
However, these three APIs are all better than the BART API, which seems to change occasionally.
Comment · 6 years ago
I've been looking for something like this for a while to organise photos from my phone, also without success. I hold all my photos locally and then securely sync them to a remote NAS.
My photo album folder naming structure is slightly different from this, but this will still speed up sorting photos.
Comment · 6 years ago
The London boards are for sale in the US - https://www.traintrackr.io/product/
Paris is certainly on the list for future maps.
Comment · 6 years ago
Hi, Richard here from Traintrackr
For the MBTA in Boston we did this, but their system is much less complex than London - https://www.traintrackr.co.uk/product/mbta4
Comment · 6 years ago
Hi, Richard here from Traintrackr
As others have mentioned, there are more trains running than there are station LEDs, so in central London the LEDs would almost always be on, which didn't look as good.
For the MBTA in Boston we added LEDs in between each station, and even went further and added LEDs for each direction, but with only 4 lines it was much easier to put together - https://www.traintrackr.co.uk/product/mbta4
We're looking into this for London, but making it look good is significantly more complex with the number of lines and large interchange stations.
Comment · 10 years ago
It looks like AliExpress have put some of their prices up in the last week, so they can "reduce" them for this sale. The sale price seems to match exactly the price I was seeing last week.
I noticed this for a few random items I had open in tabs, but hand't committed to buying.
Also, I'm in the UTC−05:00 timezone, but for me the sale doesn't start until 3am, so midnight UTC−08:00.
Although I'm not sure my family will be too happy.