LED-Metro-Sign

Build you own real time Washington DC Metro board! This board was made to resemble the train prediction board found in DC metro stations.

Hardware:

1. Raspberry Pi Zero WH
2. Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi
3. 64x32 RGB LED Matrix - 6mm pitch
4. 16GB Micro SD Card
5. 5V power supply

Here is a helpful guide that I used to set up hardware components for a LED matrix.

Software:

Prod_Prediction_Ticker.py & Prod_Display_Image.py fetch data from the WMATA API, format responses for the LED board, and display refreshed information at 10-second intervals. I used the existing rpi-rgb-led-matrix library by Henner Zeller to handle the connection between images stored on the PI and the physical LED board.

Once a connection to the Raspberry Pi is established, follow these steps. Note that I used a Raspberry Pi Zero WH running Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit with a headless connection through SSH. The following is a list of shell commands to install dependencies and items from this repo.

1. Install Python Dependencies.

   • sudo apt-get install python-dev libatlas-base-dev # numpy/pandas dependency
   • sudo pip3 install pandas
   • sudo pip3 install numpy
   • sudo apt-get install -y git python3-dev python3-pillow # dependencies for Pillow
   • git clone https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix.git # rgbmatrix library

2. Setup rpi-rgb-led-matrix library

   • cd rpi-rgb-led-matrix
   • make build-python PYTHON=$(which python3)
   • sudo make install-python PYTHON=$(which python3)

3. Clone this repo in new directory

   • cd
   • git clone https://github.com/kevcraig/LED-Metro-Sign.git

4. Create your own WMATA_API_KEY.txt file in the LED-Metro-Sign directory. Request a WMATA developer key here

   • cd LED-Metro-Sign
   • touch WMATA_API_KEY.txt # create file
   • cat > WMATA_API_KEY.txt # paste your key and take note to not enter any excess spaces or lines, press CTRL + D to save and quit

5. Update the board_station variable in line 11 of the Prod_Prediction_Ticker.py file to match your desired station

6. Run both python programs from the LED-Metro-Sign directory. Sign will still run even if you quit SSH connection

   • sudo nohup python3 Prod_Prediction_Ticker.py & sudo nohup python3 Prod_Display_Image.py

7. OPTIONAL: Kill all python processes on the raspberrypi if you want to troubleshoot something

   • sudo killall python3