This Wearable Transit Tracker Puts the "T" in T-Shirt

Guy Dupont's shirt shows MBTA train status via a series of sewn-on LEDs.

Jeremy Cook
4 years agoWearables

On a 2019 trip, Android applications developer Guy Dupont noticed that the departures board at Union Station in New Haven, Connecticut had been upgraded to a bright color screen. While arguably better and certainly more versatile than the split-flap device that came before, it was still sad for him to see this clicky machine go the way of the dinosaur.

The experience also got him thinking about how his work as a software developer is often a matter of combining different elements together to create code in an efficient way, and wondered what it would take to engineer something a bit differently, without worrying as much about the next person who needed to recycle his code. Although one could argue that any invention is built on a wide variety of technologies that came before, and that perhaps this will inspire someone else, his Transit Tracker T-Shirt is certainly one of a kind.

The project uses an Adafruit Gemma M0 board to control 17 WS2812 LED units. It signals each to blink at different rates in order to represent departure times of trains running on Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), AKA, “The T.” As trains approach each station, they blink faster and faster, with a solid light meaning that a train is going to leave within one minute. Each LED as well as the Gemma M0 are sewn into the shirt with conductive wire, and train data is pulled from the MBTA’s API via an Android phone. This data is then passed along as a MIDI information, which while nominally music-oriented, reportedly works quite well in this type of general-information situation.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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