This Raspberry Pi project ensures you'll never miss a bus again with an ominous countdown

If you live close to a bus stop, you may know the struggles of aligning your schedule with the bus departure times. Make one small error, and you’ll see your bus zip past just as you’re beginning to approach.

Fortunately, we have the power of Raspberry Pis and bus schedule APIs to help us get there just on time. Such is the case of the Bus o’clock, a Raspberry Pi project that uses bus GPS data to track when it will arrive at your stop and warns you accordingly.

Bus o’clock adds a fun yet ominous countdown to your daily routine

In a post on Hackster, tinkerer Maureen Rakotondraibe shared their latest project, the Bus o’clock. As with all great inventions, it was made to solve a common problem she kept experiencing:

Have you ever missed a bus by just a few minutes? Or got to the bus stop way too early?

My bus stop is 5 minutes away from my apartment. It is super convenient however, because it is that close, I often think that I have more time than I really do.

I would check on Google maps, see that I have 20 spare minutes before the next bus, and then check back way too late leading to me running downstairs or in the worst case, missing it by a few minutes.

This is the principal motivation of creating a Bus o’clock project, which is a bus tracker pulling data from the CTA Chicago API and showing the time remaining in a gauge format for a visual person like me. That and wanting to experiment with the really cool round display from Waveshare :).

The clock keeps tabs on the next bus Maureen can catch by tapping into the CTA Chicago and checking when her next ride is about to turn up. Once a bus is on its way, the pointer will point to the green wedge; this tells Maureen that she has enough time to get ready to go. Ideally, Maureen leaves right as the pointer hits yellow, but if she’s having issues getting ready, she can still catch the next bus when the pointer points to the somewhat ominous red wedge, titled “Run.”

Of course, Maureen doesn’t need to know when every bus is approaching. So, to reduce power usage and API calls, she implemented a little pause button. When she doesn’t plan a bus journey planned for the day, she can press it, and the clock stops tracking when her next bus will arrive, resting the pointer on the pink “On Hold” wedge. Pressing it again resumes the tracking.

If you want more cool Raspberry Pi-powered transport tracking, check out when someone made a full Manhattan subway map with one.