Proposal : Madison Transit Kiosk project

[Greg Tracy]

I want to float an idea out to the Sector67 crowd to see if anyone would like to collaborate on a project with me. There is demand for Metro bus kiosks similar to the one at Mother Fool's coffeehouse. If you haven't seen it, check out this post - http://www.gregtracy.com/when-pet-projects-grow-up-and-become-somethin

What I'd like to do is create a version of this that can be quickly and easily built and deployed at a relatively low price point (think under $300). Unlike the Mother Fool's example and others like it, this new version would be self-contained rather than pairing a display with a low-cost computer. Ideally, the hardware would run a tiny version of Linux that auto-boots a broswer (maybe we could leverage ChromeOS?). 

I can provide the most help with the front-end part that displays the actual Metro schedule using the SMSMyBus API. But I need a lot of help on the hardware side. 

Anyone interested in helping in this civic hacking project?

Thanks!

[Joe Kerman]

Very much!  I had been beard-scratching about building a display for s67 for a while now.  and something that could display on an LCD monitor, but require very little in the way of computing hardware is very easy to do.  Were you thinking of a passive display? only displaying the local stops?  Or something interactive with a keypad/touchscreen of some sort?

Microcontrollers (like arduino) can easily talk composite video, making a backpack that would attach to any television set is one way to go.  You can get an arduino talking to a TV with wifi to pull data in for less than $100

just my initial thoughts. Im sure other people have put some thought into it already too!

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[Carol Bracewell]

I've no idea what it takes to put data on these screens, but they are small and cheap and could be put in something like a thick picture frame and hung on a wall.
http://www.allelectronics.com/make-a-store/item/LCD-104/640-X-480-LCD-W/CCFL-BACKLIGHT-AND-INVERTER//1.html

Carol

[Preston Austin]

Hi all,

At first I would like passive, bright, fairly large displays for key stops. My thought was to later add a mobile app that can allow limited interactivity via SMS and phone to alter data on kiosks.

It's a lot of data to show from a distance so big is good. I can get 3 of those funded immediately at a level that could pay for a small ITX cpu box and thin 22" or so LED (bright, efficient) flatpanel but have not had the time it would take to get it working with my atrophied Linux chops.

So I can contribute maybe $9-1200 of other peoples money from folks who will want them, and am totally up for interface and server work to flesh out back end needs of a kiosk presenting web service.

Thanks,

P

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Preston Austin

+1.608.345.6101

http://imby.info/p/prestonaustin

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[William LaFrance]

Okay, I just woke up so I lost a few details in the skim. Are you looking to use full blown computers, or microcontrollers? If you want to use computers, a Pentium 1 can run Slackware with Firefox directly on top of X11 (ie, no window manager) fairly well if I remember. That way, anyone who isn't an old bearded UNIX guy can't really screw with it and you could just write a cronjob to make sure they're behaving with it.

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[Walker, Larry]

Greg:

I definitely want to help with this; great concept!

Some thoughts:

1) Having a (likely old, non-E* CRT TV) drawing power all day seems painful.

2) A large (laptop or bigger) color display seems like over-kill. The one-line red-dot-LED crawl they had in the shelter at Mifflin & Pinckney did/does a fine job.

3) Think really, really cheap; so cheap you could have them scattered around a coffee shop, in a variety of form-factors: A desk lamp w/LCD strip in base; a wall-mounted crawl; an old 60's electronic alarm clock, a small, eye-level 4x40 LCD (maybe 4x5 inches) showing next 3 buses at front door as you leave...

Such a device needs a way to pull data from Greg's API, likely via HTTP. Much easier to do if it has some sort of OS, a tiny Linux seems the likely choice, so what kind of tiny PC-on-a-board can run Linux and costs about $50-100? Add various sorts of $50 LCD/LED displays (not a 640x480 VGA displays) and a set them to auto-refresh once a minute.

And they'll need wifi and/or ethernet for the feed to the API. Should be available with the tiny-PC-on-a-board, but may cost extra for wifi.

Here's one:

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7400

Larry

[Craig Hineline]

Larry,

What you are describing reminds me of a beagle board ($149).  http://www.beagleboard.org

Good luck!

[Carol Bracewell]

That's an interesting link, and got me to a more general page:

http://designsomething.org/

The Lizard item seems to run Android, which makes me what OS would make the most sense to use.

This whole area is pretty cool looking, but I don't know enough to evaluated it.

http://www.dave.eu/dave-cpu-module-am3517-lizard.html

[Greg Tracy]

Great discussion and I'm glad to see so much interest!

I want to shoot high here. Cheaper is not necessarily better for this project. As Preston pointed out, we have some partners that are willing to support this project. But most importantly, a high quality solution will draw attention and it will be more likely to get adoption.

I like the idea of the Arduino/Beagle Board approach, but I'm not familiar with their ability to run modern client software (like a browser). If we can launch a browser, we can do anything we want with the transit data via javascript and html5. So I'm partial to a solution that runs a modern browser, which is why I was suggesting a linux solution.

I'm going to start a spec document on Google Docs and share it with the entire group.

Cheers.

Greg

[Walker, Larry]

OK, here's another whole take on it: great price point, but now that they have an actual browser for it, there's like no hacking to do :-(

http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-photo-frames/insignia-infocast/4505-13499_7-34122469.html

I'd still want a BeagleBoard-style option with a cheap 4x32 char LCD, so I could stick the bus app into retro electronic appliances from St. Vinnies....

Larry

[Walker, Larry]

This one may not have a browser, so then we'd have to hack it:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Insignia%26%23153%3B+-+Infocast+3.5%22+Internet+Media+Display/1152881.p?id=1218226456157&skuId=1152881&st=insignia

Larry

On Mar 20, 2011, at 8:11 PM, Carol Bracewell wrote:

[Preston Austin]

Larry, 

Although I know of  immediate needs for glitzy higher end media rich browser approach, what you outline for tiny/cheap promotes complementing ubiquity and that would be super awesome - I'm very interested in pursuing it as well.

i dont know much of what simpler system's limits are, but I would love a simple scrolling LED marquee cheap enough that a neighbor could stick a solar one on a fence post near the stop for example, self contained and getting API data off their (or muni) wifi.

My medium term hope is that like clocks, data about bus routes and Realtime time/status becomes background everyone just sort of knows - via multiple modes.

Preston

[Greg Tracy]

go bigger...

btw, i really like the retro appliance idea. would be fun to do
something like that for an office desk accessory. maybe something like
these...

http://www.likecool.com/Robolamps_by_Robert_Matysiak--Lighting--Home.html

greg

[Carol Bracewell]

At $99  it's cheaper than the BeagleBoard! I do like the small size. I somehow can't see a coffeeshop putting a bus schedule on a 22 inch monitor by the door. It seems to me like it would overwhelm even the artwork on the rest of the walls. What's driving the size requirement? We might home in faster if we had a simple rundown of the client desires? We seem to all have a different hankering....

C