Never mind, I found it 
It starts up OK, and funny enough it looks like its last use for it was bus times, and it’s kept the times from who knows how many years ago in memory and it still shows them when it starts up 
Still not convinced it’s the best display for this, it’s visually “noisy” (especially if it scrolls around) and probably a bit wastful to keep powered on 24/7. But I’m definitely going to try to hook it up with something because it looks awesome, just need to find the manual.
Yeah the last time we had it up we tested it for bus times, it will be great to use it for something but as you said it’s probably a bit power-hungry.
But let’s find out if we can talk to it and I’ll put my clamp metre on it to find out how much electricity it uses
Lifelong hand truck user here, and I am really going to appreciate this device! Many thanks.
First attempt to make it show on an e-paper display. Ignore the size, I was originally designing for a smaller display but I managed to get a 7 inch one.
Looks great! Size is good?!
Here it is with the right size, I reckon it’s readable standing 1 meter away or something like that. It’s similar size to the displays you sometimes see outside a meeting room showing if it’s booked or not.
I don’t see my train… 
Trains are coming. I’m focusing on getting this to work reliably end-to-end showing 1 bus stop, then cycling between multiple bus stops, then I’m going to also add train stations.
Looks very nice! Great work!
Are you using BeautifulSoup to parse the data?
No, there’s no need to resort to screen scraping.
TfL has a decent API for getting the bus arrival times for each bus stop: TfL Unified API
The National Rail API for trains is a bit silly (SOAP/XML 
) but fortunately there are some good wrappers like TransportAPI https://developer.transportapi.com/docs-legacy?raml=https://docs.transportapi.com/raml/transportapi.raml##request_uk_train_station_station_code_live_json
I’ll publish the Micropython code once I clean it up a bit, I want other people to be able to maintain and improve it after I install it.
Awesome! Thanks!
Great!
Now works with trains too! Honestly the hardest part was not the device but finding a way to consume the National Rail API which is horrible (in the end I built a little wrapper in the cloud)
I like that official TfL font. Nice touch.
Don’t tell TfL though, because I “borrowed” these web fonts from their website and their intellectual property department might not be too happy 
I built a train reminder browser plugin 5 years ago but I stopped using it after I stopped commuting to Surrey. Not sure what API I used at the time but…
Between National Rail Enquiries, Southern Rail, and SW Rail, a little birdie told me only the SW Rail live train data endpoint does not require a valid token: https://railinfo.southwesternrailway.com/journey/departures/HNH
I may or may not have minimum web request parameters for the others but not sure if they’ll expire after a certain amount of time. Official APIs are of course always the proper way to do these things 
If you want to be squeaky clean, Railway Sans is an open license font that very closely matches Johnston
Hey @futureshape - what are your thoughts on that giant bus times display? It has been kicking around the space for years and no one has found a real project/use for it. Any ideas, or should we finally get rid of it?
Cheers,
I did some research on using it for bus times. Full specs are here: https://www.alpha-american.com/p-alpha-4160c.html
It looks like it the maximum it can do is display 2 rows of 40 characters, which is much less than would be useful for a bus/train display. You could have it scrolling/swapping between different pages, but I think it would be distracting to have something always flashing in a corner, wherever we put it.
I can’t think of anything else apart from train times that would need to be displayed in public at a makerspace. The only other example I’ve seen back at London Hackspace was a display that anyone could send a message to, I think linked to IRC. The original purpose was to show important announcements and for people to remotely attract attention of someone in the space, but I believe by the end it was just showing jokes and other random stuff. So I wouldn’t recommend it. We can communicate well enough using Discourse.
Pretty sure the sign is still worth something to someone, maybe eBay it or sell it somehow and use the money for some other improvements to the space?
Yea, sounds good, I have yet to hear a good idea that is actually useful and also doesn’t waste power leaving the thing on all the time!
