When will the next bus come?
Departing.io - A web app for real time bus ACTION bus arrivals in Canberra, Australia.
Try it on your smartphone!
While the software for planning trips is well established (such as Google Maps) I found it was still a chore to find when the next bus would arrive. The LED screens at major bus stations are helpful but they may only show 5 buses at a time - which may not include the one you are looking for. I created Designless.io for the sole purpose of finding when the next bus on a route will depart from a given stop.
- Open the web app from the home screen of your smartphone
- Type the first few letters of the bus stop you are at and select from the menu
- If there is more than one route departing select the desired bus route
- See how many minutes and seconds until the bus arrives in real time
To run an instance of the web app you will need to apply for an ACTION NXTBUS API key. You will receive the key in an email along with some documentation. To keep your key private the app receives the key as the environment variable NXTBUS_API_KEY (described in the Running App section)
This web app uses:
- Python Tornado as a non-blocking web server
- Processing to visualise the information, translated into JavaScript and shown on an HTML5 Canvas
- Heroku for hosting
- npm for managing Gulp dependencies and installing bower (
package.json
) - Bower for managing front end dependencies (
bower.json
) - Gulp used to compile SCSS, lint JavaScript and minify (
gulpfile.js
)
On Mac OSX, first install Homebrew:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://github.com/raw/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Mac:
brew update
brew install -g node
Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
As per https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/installing.html
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
sudo python get-pip.py
-
Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/jakecoppinger/departing.io.git
cd departing.io
-
Install Node dependencies
npm install
-
Install Bower dependencies
bower install
(you must do this after installing Node dependencies as that will install Bower) -
Python dependencies
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
Where APIKEY is your key:
export NXTBUS_API_KEY=APIKEY
You can add this line to your ~/.bashrc
file to skip this step in future.
gulp
python main.py --host=HOST
Where HOST is IP address or domain. For testing on local machine, use localhost
, for testing on local network (including smartphones) use local IP address (ifconfig
)
I developed this web app through year 12 as part of my media studies, and later released it as open source under the GPL license. If you have any comments or suggestions please don't hesitate to contact me at jake@jakecoppinger.com
See more of my work at jakecoppinger.com
Departing.io, a web app to answer the question of "When will the next bus come?" Copyright (C) 2016 Jake Coppinger
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.