Helo with using a Galactic Unicorn as a train departure board

Hi,

One thing I have always wanted is a live train departure board but the prebuilt ones are somewhat expensive.

I recently stumbled an article called “Using a Raspberry Pi PICO-W to retrieve and display real-time train arrivals on a 20x4 character OLED” and this had me wondering if I can use the Galactic Unicorn for the scrolling display. Thing is I’m a bit stuck as to how to get this project going.

Is such a thing possible and if so could someone please give me a leg-up on the best way to proceed?

There’s already a scrolling text example for Galactic Unicorn in the Git Repo. The possibly difficult part is going to be scraping live train information off the web, as I think some train companies are not well set up for public data access like that. Maybe try following that guide you found until you get the the point where you have the departure data, because then it’s a case of passing that to Galactic Unicorn.

Ah many thanks I’ll have a look at the scrolling text example.

As for getting the departure information I can make use of the National Rail Enquires data feed as I have an API key. If that fails then I can always use the instructions in the tutorial I found.

You don’t say what language you’re working in; I’ve got an extended scrolling text example that pulls data from a web service which might be a more useful starting point (although you’d still have to parse the data feed yourself), but it’s in C rather than MicroPython.