Train Signal Announcer

This code is part of a project to turn an old Lionel train signal into a real train arrival announcer complete with working lights and gate motion. This Python code fetches arrival/departure information from Amtrak, and - when a train arrival or departure is in progress at the configured station - creates an retro sounding announcement using some background audio and text-to-voice generated using AWS Polly. It also uses Raspberry Pi GPIO to actuate the Lionel signal's gate and flash its caution lights.

Usage

This code has a few entrypoints for testing and using the code:

• get_data.py gets the latest Amtrak data and pretty prints it
• main.py is the main program to monitor for arrivals or departures and then play the full audio and fire GPIO to announce and signal the trainm
• test_amtrak.py tests the code to wait for an arrival or departure and prints its information to standard out
• test_signal.py tests the GPIO code to actuate the gate and blink the caution lights

Configuration

The code uses a few environment variables to control the software:

• AUDIO_DIR is the location of the audio samples to use for announcement generation
• STATION_CODE is the desired station code to monitor for arrivals and departures

Note the audio generation code uses an AWS service and boto3. It will use the default AWS profile configured for the machine.

Requirements

• Python 3
• PIP

Installation

This code is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi with the following GPIO connections:

There is also a trainannouncer.service file that you may use to run main.py as a service. To install that:

% sudo apt install python3 python3-pip
% git clone https://github.com/johnjones4/train-announcer
% cd train-announcer
% pip3 install -r requirements.txt
% sudo cp trainannouncer.service /etc/systemd/system/trainannouncer.service
% sudo systemctl daemon-reload
% sudo systemctl enable trainannouncer.service
% systemctl start trainannouncer.service