Bus Time Alerter

Inspiration

MiWay does not provide any indicators of when buses will be arriving at their bus stations. This means you must use an app such as google maps or transit. This puts many such as the elderly at a disadvantage as they may not be tech savvy enough to use a phone.

What it does

This device connects to a server that gives our ESP32 information on when the next bus will be arriving. The ESP32 then displays this information on its screen.

How we built it

We used and ESP32 and connected it to a 1.8 TFT SPI 128*160 v1.1 screen. We then set up a wifi connection to the ESP32 so it could pull data from a server. We created our mock server using flask.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to connect to the school wifi was difficult and we found out that we had to downgrade to an older version of our board manager to fix the errors we were running into. We also wanted to add a button that when pressed would announce when the next bus would be arriving on a speaker so that the visually impaired could use this device as well, however there were no speakers available as parts so we had to scrape the idea. However after the competition I will use one of my own speakers to add this functionality.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of creating a project that can connect to the internet and display information

What we learned

We learned how ESP32's connect to the internet.

What's next for Bus Time Alerter

As mentioned in the challenges section we would like to add a speaker to make announcements for the visually impaired. Additional functionality could also include a map showing where the next bus is.

Built With

• esp32
• flask