Build Your Own LCD Bus Schedule

MikeLRoy writes "An engineering student in Winnipeg, tired of missing his bus to school (and waiting in the cold) created an LCD bus stop. It displays the next bus times for several stops and routes, all from the heated comfort of his kitchen. And yes, there are pics and code on the site."

Re:Buses?

[smithmc]

Waddaya mean, "be a grad student my hole life"? He's an undergraduate freshman. And if you want to skip school and jump into the job market as a tester, that's all fine and good, but if you did it for the money (as your post indicates) it wasn't such a good move. Ten years from now, this guy's probably going to be making at least twice your salary.

Re:with the money and time

[Anonymous Coward]

that he put into the LCD and everything else in the project, he could have worked and bought a car. Sure, there's the geeky challenge of it all, but just as you don't win friends with salad, you don't get chicks by riding the bus.

quite, possibly, like my self, he has a car but chooses to take the bus becasue:

• buses are more environmently friendly
• buses don't need to park
• buses cost less to ride
• ect

sure i don't get chicks while riding the bus, but who wants a chick that is that shallow?

remember, one person can't fix the world alone, but one can ruin it for all

Why lynx -source?

[Mr. Sketch]

If he's using perl couldn't he just as easily use the LWP::UserAgent module (part of libwww-perl [cpan.org])?

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $source = $ua->get("http://slashdot.org")->content;

Re:I am not an electrician!

[ceejayoz]

Voltage doesn't matter, it's amperage that'll kill you... there's upwards of 10,000 volts in static electricity.

Same reason a 50,000 volt taser won't kill you, but a 110 volt outlet can.

Phone Lines Won't Kill.. Get a Headache Though!

[Myriad]

I am not an electrician! Dont do this unless you know what you're doing! You can get electrocuted by phone lines!!
Unless things are a lot different in Canada you cannot get electrocuted by a phone line. Electric line yes, but not a phone line.

I laughed at the electrocuted part myself. No, not even in Canada will the phone line kill you...

But, you can get one hell of a headache:

I was helping a friend wire a new jack up for his phone. Unfortunately the jack was located under his rather large, heavy desk. After I told him how to wire it up he decided that 'Oh, that's easy! I'll do it.' So, ok, yes, it is easy, go for it. But make sure you don't touch the bare wires. It won't really harm you, but if the phone should ring it can be a tad nasty.

Sure, no problem he says and climbes under the desk. Less then a minute later I suddenly hear a gasp followed by a loud BANG... the bang of his head smashing into the top of the desk.

Seems he touched the wires and was unlucky enough to be doing so when it rang. The sensation surprised him so badly he attemped to leap backwards - hard to do when crouched under a desk. I laughed so hard I could barely finish the job for him! (hey Fred, if you're reading "Hi!" :) )

Re:Eeek. Look at the klenex box.

[Trogre]

Or maybe he uses kleenex for the same purpose as the rest of us:
To blow his nose.

This is cool....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

One problem. Every bus company uses a different thing. No standards exist. Currently, my local bus company allows you to view the schedules on the web, but the labels at the top are JPEGS which mean I can't parse them into a smaller table suitable for my Pocket PC. That also renders the schedules unreadable for the blind. They don't even have a alt tag or a alternate text version. PDF schedules are unsuitable because PDF on a small device sucks. I would rather just like to be able to look at the schedule on my PDA and forget the display in my kitchen.

Missed a link

[Swaffs]

"(and waiting in the cold [ec.gc.ca])"