🚌 Bus Button (OC Transpo)

A small Raspberry Pi project I built to answer one very important daily question without wasting precious time:

“Do I need to sprint for the bus, or can I stay inside a bit longer?”

Instead of risking missing the bus by wasiting time looking up when the next one was coming, I built a physical button by my front door . When pressed, it would query OC Transpo’s API and beep the number of minutes until the next #2 bus arrived .

• Few beeps → panic, grab shoes, run
• Many beeps → relax, wait inside in the warm

Simple, fast, and perfectly effective.

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✨ How It Works

1. A button mounted near the door is pressed
2. The Raspberry Pi calls OC Transpo’s public API
3. It retrieves the next arrival time for a specific stop and route
4. The system:
   • Beeps once per minute until arrival
   • Blinks an LED the same number of times

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🔧 Hardware Used

• Raspberry Pi
• Button
• LED
• Buzzer
• Pretty pink cardboard box to put it all in

All components were wired directly to the Pi’s GPIO pins and housed in a compact box.

📸 Photos of the hardware setup and enclosure can be found in the repo (and may be added to this README later).

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🧠 Software Overview

The project is written in Python and uses:

• gpiozero for GPIO handling
• requests for HTTP calls
• OC Transpo’s API to fetch real-time bus data

Core Logic

• Press button → block until input
• Call OC Transpo’s GetNextTripsForStop endpoint
• Extract the next trip’s AdjustedScheduleTime
• Beep & blink once per minute

If the API call fails, the buzzer emits a long error beep.

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📡 OC Transpo API

This project uses the OC Transpo REST API:

Endpoint used:

GetNextTripsForStop

Inputs:

• App ID
• API Key
• Stop number
• Route number

Output used:

• AdjustedScheduleTime (minutes until arrival)

You’ll need to request your own API credentials from OC Transpo and store them in an env.py file:

appID = "YOUR_APP_ID"
apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY"

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▶️ Running the Project

1. Install dependencies:

pip install requests gpiozero

2. Wire up the button, LED, and buzzer to GPIO pins
3. Add your API credentials to env.py
4. Run:

python bus_button.py

Press the button and listen carefully 👂