Sometimes the most satisfying hacks are those that spring from a situation where resources are limited, either by choice or by chance. Constraints tend to stir the creative juices.
Serial Hackaday poster [limpkin] limited himself to a one-day build with what he had on hand for this bus-route countdown timer. Full points for actually building something useful, and extra credit for making something to keep his wife from being late for work.
The principle is simple: scrape a web page to find out how much time is left before either of two busses leaves his wife’s stop, and display the number of minutes left on a huge LED display. The parts bin gave up everything needed, including an ESP8266, a boost converter, a charge controller, and the display and driver. We’re skeptical that the PCB was fabricated the same day; looks like [limpkin] is only counting the design and coding time in his 10-hour build. Still, it’s a testament to what’s possible with a deep inventory and the skills to put it to use.
Check out some of [limpkin]’s other hacks, like this Formula-E race car PCB or his adventures in laundry larceny. Oh, and he also used to write for Hackaday.
Creating the mounting eyelet from the PCB is a nice touch
The board wasn’t fabricated, but designed within that 10 hours. Still impressive.
Incredible project, loved the PCB design.
I miss Mathieu’s write ups on HaD…
Oh thanks, that means a lot :).
It’s really too bad I don’t have enough spare time for it!
I wonder if the bus company likes the frequent polling…
I did something similar with 10 second polling (Also ESP8266, but no battery, and with an 2×16 LC-Display and a big 10mm RGB-LED turning from green [get ready] to yellow [go out of the door now] to red [wait for the next bus])
After two weeks, the non-documented API stopped accepting my HTTP requests. Turns out, they started blocking the User-Agent I sent along in he HTTP request. After a few mails I was allowed to continue the polling in a 1 minute interval.
Nice to have buses that actually run on time…