Train and Weather Tracker with Raspberry Pi and E-Ink

Summary

I finally built a Raspberry Pi project my wife loves: an e-ink train and weather tracker! If you want to build one yourself, the Github & instructions are here. Kira will be jogging to the night shift! Over the past few years, I've been on something of an e-ink journey. I started with a weather and news display (still the only post on my website that regularly gets organic traffic.) While I loved it and it looked great, a phone is a better way to check the news, and the weather only gets checked once a day. Then in 2022 while at MIT I built Jarvis, the e-ink voice-to-image display. Jarvis was a great party trick — say, "Hey Jarvis, paint me an elephant on a bowling ball in Times Square" and watch as the image gradually appeared. Notably, this was before ChatGPT, when people were still impressed by AI! Jarvis live demo is better! Then over Thanksgiving, I had some free time, a basket of spare parts, and the itch to code and build something physical. So here we are with the e-ink train and weather tracker. The idea is simple: Every morning, my wife and I take the inbound F or G subway lines to work from a stop that's a 2-minute jog or a 6-minute walk from our house. I love the NYC subway and it works incredibly well, but the trains come often and predictably, not on-a-schedule. So every morning we're calling out, when's the next G, when's the next F — and one of us pulls out a phone for the MTA app or Google Maps and yells back the upcoming train times. Then we time our morning routines to either stretch for a train in three minutes or slow down for a train in ten. The subway and weather tracker makes checking train times much faster and calmer than pulling out a phone. Since it's centrally located in our home, someone is always close enough to glance at it. The subway times reported by the MTA API are reliable once the train is within a few stops or 15 minutes away, with precision increasing as the trains get closer. Having the train times on the wall lets you check ...