Ambient Display - Bus Tracker Truck

While screens may be popular for viewing information, they are definitely not the only means to consume information. There are several opportunities for visualizing information from around our environment and with this project, we seek to hack into one those.

The model truck in this project helps visualize estimated arrival times of a bus by the movement of cargo packages at the back of the truck. Using the Transloc API, we pull data of specific bus routes and visualize the ETA to a chosen spot by the height of a cargo box that moves vertically.

Several Components of the model can be 3D Printed. The truck body was designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and the 'stl' file generated was taken to Cura to generate a 'gcode' for the Qidi Mini X-2 3D Printer. Since the the size of the print bed was limited to 9mm x 9mm, we printed the truck body in 3 parts:

The remaining components of the model can be 3d printed. SVG files for the Laser cuts are provided:

The electronics mainly consist of:

1. 2x L293D H Bridge
2. 2x 28-byj stepper motors (12V or 5V)
3. 2x Particle Photons
4. Jumper Wires
5. Breadboard