At this point, there are tons of apps that let us know when our trains are running late. But apps aren’t nearly as pretty as an LED light strip set up to blink when something’s wrong with your commute.
London-based developer James Singleton used a Raspberry Pi B+ and the London Underground’s API to turn a Blinky Tape LED strip into a combination light decoration/train delay notification system.
Blinky Tape lets you customize the colors on your LED strip, so Singleton color-coded his to correspond to the colors of the Tube.
Singleton published the code he used for the project on Github. And even though it’s London-specific, any train system that has an API like London’s could be measured in this way. It’d be great to see someone use the MTA’s API to create one of these strips for New Yorkers who want a prettier way to see how screwed the L train is.
[Hackaday]