LCD display + Raspberry Pi + Real-time bus info: great alarm!

Some weeks ago, I saw a friend of mine using an LCD display to show some text using Arduino, so I asked him if he could get me one of those displays for me. Days after, he gave me one and I couldn’t stop thinking what to do next with it.

Finally, I got together my obsession with real-time local data and my Raspberry: something great came to my mind. I’m really lazy and I hate waking up in the morning and waste minutes waiting for my bus to come whereas I could be sleeping. Optimizing sleeping time is key to me, so I decided to build an alarm clock based on real-time bus info, adding some of the time I need to get ready to it.

I would explain how I connected the LCD and programmed the thing, but true is I couldn’t explain it better than this post actually does:

http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/07/16x2-lcd-module-control-using-python/

I included some changes to the original code, so I could turn it into a class I could extended and call whenever I needed to handle the lines of my LCD, but it was nothing to write home about.

Using the private, unpublished and undocumented API (EMT Valencia, it’s time for open data!) I stablished a simple connection to it to get a real-time feed for my nearest bus stop so I could display the timing on the LCD and, whenever the bus was about to come, a red led would blink as a visual indicator.