Tuesday, September 30, 2014

KotiBussi, 3 place and shared challenge price

Related to the previous post in Finnish. It is a description of my entry to the regional app4finland competition, a simple home Buss information display concept.

The idea is to have realtime display of buss(es) on a simple display so you know when to run to the buss-stop. The idea came when I started to think about what is the most annoying thing with using public transport here in my home city of Turku. I personally hate to stand at the buss-stop and wonder where the hell is it, or did it go already ? And at this time there are just a handfull of stops with information displays (that don't even display correct information, last time I needed to take a local buss).

Yes, you can get that from an app or web site. But not everyone has a smartphone. And how much time does it take to first dig the from somewhere, start the app, wait for it to load, then find the particular buss/buss-stop, etc (but the backend could be used for a mobile app, so that is not ruled out)

And this could be used not only at home, but for example at the work place, stores and hospitals. Well, you get the picture.

And instead of having the device polling the information, it uses MQTT to passively listen for changes and that means it does not need much of processing power, a basic arduino is just fine.

The backend part is still to be written, basically a SIRI to MQTT gateway.

Oh, the important part, I won! Third place in one category and shared winner of a specific challenge (transport).

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