[Stefan Schüller] was a supporter of the LED signs that display arrival information for the trams and buses in their town of Zürich. [Stefan] was possessing difficulty getting a source to obtain the indicators so, rather, resolved to establish a person himself.
[Stefan] made a decision to recreate the 56×208 solitary coloration 2mm dot pitch show with an 128 x 64 P2 RGB LED display respecting the very same 2 mm pitch. The show is pushed by an ESP32 DMA RGB LED matrix shield using a HUB75 RGB LED matrix library, all currently being run from a 5 V 4 A electricity offer.
In addition to driving the LED matrix exhibit, the ESP32 polls Zürich’s general public transportation API and then parses the XML for the applicable information. Given that [Stefan] required to match the fonts as carefully as achievable,
he made a new font from scratch, including the bus and accessibility icons. The new font was encoded into a glyph bitmap distribution structure (BDF) that was then converted to work with Adafruit’s GFX library, with [Stefan] generating a custom made conversion device, named bdf2adafruit, to do the past leg of the conversion.
Since the LED matrix experienced entire shade capability, [Stefan] determined to incorporate a little extra prosper and coloration code the transportation strains with the formal tram shades. All supply code is available on his GitHub repository for the undertaking, for individuals wanting for extra element.
We’ve showcased Do-it-yourself builds of public transportation feeds prior to. With the ubiquity of low charge RGB LED shows and community APIs, hopefully we’ll see several more!
