davweb / nimbus

Display bus arrival times on a Raspberry Pi with an e-ink screen.

nimbus

Display bus arrival times on a Raspberry Pi with an e-ink screen.

The display shows up to three upcoming buses for a stop. Touching the display cycles through different stops.

Hardware

This is inteded for use with:

• A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• A Waveshare 2.13inch Touch e-Paper HAT

The e-Paper HAT is available with a case from The Pi Hut.

Set-Up

Image the SD Card for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Rasperry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) using the Raspberry Pi Imager. Use the settings in the imager to set hostname, enable SSH and specifiy the wi-fi password.

One the Pi has booted, login via SSH and configure the Raspberry PI to work with the e-Paper HAT:

• Run sudo raspi-config
• Select Interface Options → SPI and select Yes to enable.
• Select Interface Options → I2C and select Yes to enable.
• Use Finish to exit the configuration tool.
• Reboot.

Install gitand then clone this repository:

sudo apt-get install -y git
git clone https://github.com/davweb/nimbus.git

Run the set up script to install the required dependencies:

cd nimbus
./setup.sh

Running

Firstly get the IDs of the bus stops you want to display from here. The IDs will be a list of letters like oxfamjma.

Run the module passing in bus stop IDs as arguments:

source .venv/bin/activate
python -m nimbus oxfamjma oxfgwajm

The script runs continuously as it needs to monitor the touch screen.

The easiest way to run at boot is to schedule a script that sources the virtual environment and runs the script. For example, a script would look like:

#!/usr/bin/bash

cd /home/pi/nimbus
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m nimbus oxfamjma oxfgwajm >nimbus.out 2>&1

Schedule it with cron with the following crontab entry:

@reboot /home/pi/run-nimbus.sh