Category: Settings

September 23, 2024 Data, Settings

When We Don’t Have Live Data

We rely on data from trainsit networks, weather providers and other sources to populate our maps, it’s what keeps them lit up showing live data. Unfortunately these sources can have issues (TFL are currently experiencing a security incident and have frozen their live feeds), which in the worst case can leave our boards blank.

We’ve built a solution to this problem by letting you select alternate data, or data that we have previously recorded, to be displayed on your board in these times. For example, if you enable alternate data and there is an outage of the live data, we can show data from a previous week/month.

This is currently an experimental feature, and isn’t perfect. If we are replaying data from 2 weeks previously but had a gap in the data back then (either from a data source issue, or train engineering works, etc) that same gap will be displayed again now.

This feature can be enabled/disabled any time by visiting your traintrackr dashboard -> selecting your device -> clicking the ‘alternate data’ button.

You can check what data you are currently receiving on the device dashboard, looking for the status box, which will show one of these options.

  1. The board is displaying live data, and the data source is good.
  2. The board is displaying live data, but the live data has issues, so alternate data is available.
  3. The board is displaying alternate data because of the issues with the live data.

This feature is designed for anyone who would rather have their board lit up at these times, and doesn’t mind the data not always being live. We only show alternate data when our main data feed has issues, and will always show live data when we are receiving it, which is most of the time.

April 27, 2022 Settings

Map Trackr Layers

Our first geographic boards were designed to show rain data, but it became clear that our customers wanted to display more than just rain, so we developed a new generation of ‘map trackrs’, which can show more than rain.

These new map trackrs have the advantage of individually dimmable LEDs (64 brightness levels per LED, rather than just on/off) which lets us display much more detailed information.

The geographic maps lend themselves to environmental/weather data, so we’ve added wind and cloud cover in addition to the original rain layer.

To change the layer your board displays, login to your dashboard, click your device, and then click ‘Map Layers’

This will then show you a modal with the avalibale layers for your map type.

In addition to the new layers, we also added the ability to animate the data. This cycles through the most recent 6 frames of data, ending on the most recent frame.

We update rain data every 15 minutes, so the rain animation shows 75 minutes of data.

We update wind and cloud data every 3 hours, so this animation shows 15 hours of data.

We’ll be adding more data layers in the future, what else do you want to see on your trackrs?

May 12, 2021 Settings

Night Mode

Sometimes you might want to adjust the brightness of you board at night, either turning it down, or off completely to avoid night time distractions. With this in mind we’ve built ‘Night Mode’ to let you do this.

First you’ll need to set your timezone, so we can correctly calculate when to adjust the LEDs on your board. You can do this by heading to our website, logging in, and clicking ‘Select Timezone’ in the top right of the dashboard

Now you can click the board you want to adjust, and then the ‘Brightness / Night Mode’ button on the top of the page.

Here you’ll get a popup letting you adjust both daytime brightness, but also the nighttime settings.

You can adjust the brightness and night mode settings as required:

  1. Brightness – during normal operation, how bright should the onboard LEDs be?
  2. Enable [Night Mode] – should we enable the night mode settings?
  3. Night Brightness – How bright should the LEDs be at night? You can also select ‘LEDs off’.
  4. Night Starts – At what time do you want the night settings to start?
  5. Night Ends – At what time do you want the night settings to end?

Note: although you can’t adjust the brightness of our original 100mm x 100mm MBTA trackr, you can still setup night mode, turning the LEDs off at night.

January 13, 2021 Settings

Adjust Rain Settings

We’ve been asked a few times by customers to adjust the sensitivity of the rain data on our rain products. Here’s what we’ve done, and how you can make the changes.

For our rain maps we process precipitation radar images to determine if it’s raining in any one area, looping through all the areas on the board to get data for the entire map. For each area we calculate how many of the radar image pixels are showing rain, setting a default threshold of 8% rain pixels to show rain in that area.

You can now manually update the rain threshold, setting it from 1% to 100%. You can find the setting on your device page, head to your Traintrackr dashboard, click on your board, then look for the ‘Set Rain Threshold’ button at the top of the page.

Click the button and you’ll see a popup asking you to select a new threshold level. Once you select a new threshold we’ll send it to the board and you’ll see the change reflected within a minute. Any changes made to threshold levels when a board is not running will be sent as soon as the board reconnects again.

September 11, 2020 Settings

Adjust Brightness

Many of you were asking to adjust the LED brightness on your boards. It is important to some of you late at night when you don’t want to be blinded in a dark room, or others when using boards in bright rooms.

Brightness controls are enabled on all products released since the beginning of 2020, so this is all products except for the original square (100mm x 100mm) Boston MBTA board.

To adjust the brightness on your board head to your Traintrackr dashboard, click on your board, then look for the brightness button at the top of the page.

Click the brightness button and you’ll see a popup asking you to select a new brightness level. Once you select a new brightness level we’ll send it to the board and you’ll see the change reflected within a minute. Any changes made to brightness levels when a board is not running will be sent as soon as the board reconnects again.