Pendeltåg creates a live train station sign for the Stockholm commuter train. The project is heavily inspired by this article.
The project relies on the information exposed through the trafiklab.se APIs which give live access to departures information, network distruptions and so on. The APIs are free to use, but you need to register an account and get an API token to be able to use them.
Create a virtualenv and install the requirements:
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
It expects a configuration file named (config.ini) which should look like the following:
[API_KEY]
stations =
traffic =
[LINE]
station = Helenelund Station
line_numbers = 41,42X
type = train
direction = 2
time_window = 59
cutoff_min = 10
[APP]
refresh_min = 2
stations should contain the API Key for: SL Platsuppslag
traffic should contain the API Key for: SL Realtidsinformation
The [LINE] section allows to select the station and the line(s) to monitor. In the example above Helenelund Station is monitored and departures are filtered by line_numbers, type, direction.
You can specify the time window to monitor (time_window) even thought the display will only show the next two departures.
cutoff_min allows to filter out all the departures between now and now + cutoff. That's useful if, like me, you have to walk X minutes to reach the station.
[APP] provides configuration regarding the application itself. refresh_min specify the number of minutes between requests to the APIs. Lower tiers of the APIs have limited monthly requests.
Pendeltag is written in Python. It relies on luma-oled to handle the communication with the display. The code is formatted using black and uses mypy for static typing
The font used for the display is Open 24 Display ST which is available for free for personal use.
I used the same type of display as the original article: SSD1322 OLED which I got form AliExpress.
The display came in a 8088 configuration, to use it with a SPI-4 configuration I moved the jumper according to the data sheet on the board itself.
I have an old Raspberry PI which has a 26 GPIO output, so my configuration might be different if you have a newer Raspberry PI. The original article has the connection layout for the new Raspberry PI Zero.
| PIN Display | Pin Raspberry | Connection |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | Ground |
| 2 | 1 | 3.3V |
| 4 | 23 | SCLK |
| 5 | 19 | MOSI |
| 14 | 18 | BCM24 |
| 15 | 22 | BCM25 |
| 16 | 24 | CE0 |
SPI interface was not enabled on my card, if that's the case, you can use raspi-config to enable it. You can follow this documentation. If it's enabled you should see the following devices:
$ ls -l /dev/spi*
crw-rw---- 1 root spi 153, 0 Nov 25 08:32 /dev/spidev0.0
crw-rw---- 1 root spi 153, 1 Nov 25 08:32 /dev/spidev0.1