Been working on a real time public transit app for the Bay Area and New York but recently decided to use the same data to create a visualization of all the transit vehicles moving in real time!
Initially wanted to make this before my app but it was quite a bit to process all the GTFS data. But now that the data is already processed for the app, the visualization was quite easy to make!
Currently trying to add geocoding so users can search for destinations for routing. Been interesting as I want to avoid Google Maps and other private data sources so open street maps it is.
I also live in SF and made an iOS app (A Better Ride) to solve this exact problem. Just shows you departure times of transit for stops around you. The goal is to make transit less stressful by making it predictable and explorable. It’s just a passion project I work on in my free time with zero monetization
This app is fantastic - nice job! It is unique among transit apps in that it shows you only the routes near you and where they go. This lets you explore all the places you could travel to without dealing with transfers.
I'm working on some hardware in this space (I've been up to my eyeballs in GTFS lately) and I can tell just how much went into parsing and presenting the transit data.
If you're willing, I would love to chat about some of the UX decisions you made - specifically in summarizing and grouping the trips available at each stop, and your backend!
A while ago, I made a simple IOT dashboard in Polymer that relies only on a MQTT broker and I figure that I would share it with you all!
The dashboard displays cards which show you data and/or available controls for your devices. The dashboard connects as a MQTT client along with the other IOT devices so this can be easily added to existing MQTT networks. Cards displayed on the dashboard are defined by the devices themselves. The data flow between the dashboard and the devices is bi-directional so the cards will always reflect the state of the device. Also, as the devices go online/offline the cards will appear and disappear too.
Regarding the modularity of the project, each card is an independent polymer component so that more types of cards can be added to fit your needs. There is a handful of cards I have made to fit basic use cases but feel free to add more!
I hope you like it! Let me know what you all think.
Demo: http://crouton.mybluemix.net
*Click the “connect demo for me” button or use default MQTT details and “crouton-demo” as device name
Initially wanted to make this before my app but it was quite a bit to process all the GTFS data. But now that the data is already processed for the app, the visualization was quite easy to make!
Currently trying to add geocoding so users can search for destinations for routing. Been interesting as I want to avoid Google Maps and other private data sources so open street maps it is.
https://realtime.abetterride.app