Mini National Rail Departure Board

by Oldmaker49 in Circuits > Arduino

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Mini National Rail Departure Board

Departure Display 6x5.jpg
Fig 1 Station select.jpg
Fig 3 Button wiring.jpg

National Rail Departure Board showing real-time departure information from any rail station within Great Britain on a 3.5 inch 320 x 480 pixel TFT display. Uses Raspberry Pi PICO 2W microprocessor.

Overview

  1. Designed to emulate the look of a typical station departure board (Figure 1).
  2. Pulls data from National Rail's LDB Webservice data feed.
  3. Departures for up to 15 services can be displayed.
  4. The station can be selected from a user defined list of 24 stations (Figure 2).
  5. The display also shows the current time derived from NTP server.
  6. The user’s Wifi SSID and Password are held on the SD card in a text file “WiFi.txt”
  7. The user’s list of stations is held in on the SD card in a text file “myStations.txt”.

TO GET THE CODE AND FULL INSTRUCTIONS VISIT MY GITHUB PAGE

Oldmaker49/Mini-National-Rail-Realtime-Departure-Board: Looks like a typical UK rail departure board. Uses 3.5inch TFT display and Raspberry Pi Pico 2W to display real-time departures for any station.

Supplies

Hardware Requirements

Raspberry Pi Pico 2W microprocessor

Waveshare 3.5inch Pico-Res Touch 480 x 320 display https://www.waveshare.com/pico-restouch-lcd-3.5.htm

Push-button (n.o. spst) for scrolling and selecting the Station from the Station List. The button is soldered to the GPIO 01 pad and the GND pad on the reverse of the display board beneath the Pico plug-in connector as shown in Figure 3 .

Get National Rail Token

Obtaining access to UK National Rail data feed

A user token is required to access the National Rail data feed.

To get the token: Visit: https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/100296.aspx

Scroll down to the Darwin Data Feeds table. Find the row labelled "LDB Webservice (PV)" and click register here. Follow the registration steps. Wait for a bit and you should get an email confirming your account is activated. The email also contains your token.

Software Requirements

GET THE LATEST CODE HERE:

Oldmaker49/Mini-National-Rail-Realtime-Departure-Board: Looks like a typical UK rail departure board. Uses 3.5inch TFT display and Raspberry Pi Pico 2W to display real-time departures for any station.

The README file contains instructions and software requirements.

The User Manual can be found in the Resources folder

Example text files for your WiFi details and List of Stations can be found in the SDfiles folder.