Category: Settings

September 23, 2024 Data, Settings

Ensuring Your Board Stays Illuminated

At Traintrackr, our mission is to keep your boards brilliantly lit with the most up-to-date information from transit networks, weather providers, and other dynamic sources. We understand how important it is for your board to remain an engaging centerpiece, continuously displaying live data.

Occasionally, external data providers may experience temporary interruptions (like when Transport for London addresses a security incident affecting their live feeds). To ensure your board remains active during these rare moments, we’ve developed a feature that allows your board to display alternate data. This means your board can seamlessly showcase previously recorded information from prior weeks or months until the live data feed is restored.

How It Works

  • Automatic Activation: When a live data feed experiences issues, your board can automatically switch to alternate data, keeping your display consistently vibrant.
  • User Control: You have the flexibility to enable or disable this feature anytime by visiting your Traintrackr dashboard, selecting your device, and clicking the ‘Alternate Data’ button.
  • Status Updates: Check your current data status on your device dashboard. The status box will indicate one of the following:
    • The board is displaying live data with a healthy data source.
    • The board is displaying live data, but alternate data is available due to minor issues.
    • The board is displaying alternate data because of temporary live data interruptions.

While the alternate data feature is currently in an experimental phase, it’s designed to ensure your board remains a constant source of information and enjoyment. In the rare case we’re replaying data from a period that had its own gaps (due to past data issues or scheduled maintenance), those gaps might briefly reappear. However, we’re continuously improving this feature to make it even more seamless.

Rest assured, our priority is to display live data whenever it’s available—which is almost all the time. This feature is simply an added layer of reliability, so your board stays illuminated and engaging, regardless of external data fluctuations. Thank you for being a valued part of the traintrackr community. We’re dedicated to ensuring your product remains a timeless addition to your space.

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.