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🚂 Pico train departure display 🚂

A MicroPython-based application for displaying near-realtime UK railway departure times. It is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller, with an SSD1322-based 256x64 SPI OLED display.

This project uses Realtime Trains API as its data source, and is heavily inspired by several other projects.

completed display

Introduction

The goal of this project is to display a live departure board for a station, showing trains departing for a specific destination. It's written entirely in Python and should be able to run on any microcontroller that is capable of running MicroPython.

It's been extensively tested on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which was challenging due to its limited RAM, and with an SSD1322-based display.

Building your own display

TODO: Add steps on how to build the display from scratch!

Installation

The easiest way is to install the Pico Train Dispaly software is to download the pre-built image from the latest release. To install on a Raspberry Pi Pico:

  1. Press and hold down the BOOTSEL button while you connect the other end of the micro-USB cable to your computer. This will put the Raspberry Pi Pico into USB mass storage device mode.
  2. Copy the downloaded pico_train_display.uf2 file to the mounted device. Once complete, the device should automatically disconnect.
  3. Connect the Raspberry Pi Pico to a power supply. The display should now show a welcome message with details on how to connect to the setup website.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions. Once the settings are saved, the device should automatically restart.

You should now have a fully configured Pico-powered train display!

Reset settings

Settings are stored in flash memory as a JSON file called config.json. To reset all settings, simply delete this file. One easy way to do this is to reset the entire flash memory, which can be done by following the official resetting flash memory instructions. Once flashed, you'll need to re-install the software again.

🚧 Experimental Displays 🚧

Along with the SSD1322-based displays, there's also experimental support for 2.9" e-Paper display. It's doesn't look as authentic, but is also super simple to setup!

ePaper display

Credits

Firstly, a massive thank you to Dave Ingram for inspiring me to work on this project in the first place, and helping me with the hardware and low-level driver software!

Thanks also goes to various other incantations of this project, namely Chris Crocker-White, Chris Hutchinson, and of course Dave.

Also a big thank you to the wonderful folk at Realtime Trains for providing a brilliant API for train departures.

Finally thank you to Daniel Hart who created the wonderful Dot Matrix type face, and Peter Hinch for his font-to-python tool, which saved my sanity.