Tiny OLED Bus Timetable from a Web Scrape (not an API)

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1

Hello,

Not exactly a massive project but a fun introduction for me to the Pimoroni 1.2" Mono OLED.

Inspired by this post, I thought I’d put that little OLED to some use and see if I could:

  • Scrape a website to determine when the next bus to town is departing.
  • Write this to the OLED.
  • Keep refreshing.
#!/usr/bin/env python3

# General
import os
import time

# For the scraping
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

# For the oled
from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageFont
from PIL import ImageDraw
from threading import Thread
from luma.core.interface.serial import i2c
from luma.core.render import canvas
from luma.oled.device import sh1106

# Set up OLED
oled = sh1106(i2c(port=1, address=0x3C), rotate=2, height=128, width=128)

# Load fonts
rr_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'fonts', 'Roboto-Regular.ttf'))
print(rr_path)
rb_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'fonts', 'Roboto-Black.ttf'))
rr_12 = ImageFont.truetype(rr_path, 12)
rr_24 = ImageFont.truetype(rr_path, 24)

# The main loop that writes to the OLED
while True:
    # Page url to scrape
    page_url ='https://www.buses.co.uk/stops/149000006645'

    # Fetch the content from url
    page_response = requests.get(page_url, timeout=5)

    # Parse html
    page_content = BeautifulSoup(page_response.content, "html.parser")

    # Extract the html element where the next time expected is stored
    time_expected = page_content.find(class_='single-visit__time--expected')

    # Strip extraneous html
    next_bus = time_expected.text.strip()

    # Start to draw to the display
    background = Image.open("images/bus.png").convert(oled.mode)
    draw = ImageDraw.ImageDraw(background)

    # Draw the top line
    draw.rectangle([(0, 0), (128, 20)], fill="black")
    draw.line([(0, 20), (128, 20)], fill="white")

        # Draw the text
    draw.rectangle([(0, 108), (128, 128)], fill="black")
    draw.text((10, 40), "The next bus is in", fill="white", font=rr_12)
    draw.text((20, 60), next_bus, fill="white", font=rr_24)

        # Draw the bottom line
    draw.rectangle([(0, 108), (128, 128)], fill="black")
    draw.line([(0, 108), (128, 108)], fill="white")

    # Display on the OLED
    oled.display(background)
    time.sleep(0.05)

Well, it works, so now I don’t have to keep looking at the bus app on my phone in a morning…

imgNextBusOLED
imgNextBusOLED.jpg1152×864 170 KB

Hope this helps someone looking for a simple way to write basic text to the display.

Cheers,

Simon.

2

That looks great, glad I inspired a project! Bus departures are a really good use case for a simple always on display and great to have code that works in Non London :)