Category: Data

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.

September 7, 2024 Data

TFL Data Outage

We rely on data from TFL to populate our London Underground live maps, currently we are getting no data for the majority London’s tube lines. TFL have told us this is connected to the ongoing security incident they are responding to, which you can read more about here – https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/cyber-security-incident

Although our London Underground boards aren’t lighting up as they should, this is a problem with our data sources, and not the boards themselves. As soon as we receive data again from TFL our boards will light up again.

The Guardian go into a bit more detail on what is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/06/transport-for-london-cuts-data-feeds-to-travel-apps-citymapper-amid-cyber-attack

To check on the status of our data sources (including seeing how many arrivals we are receiving for each line), you can check our status page – https://www.traintrackr.co.uk/status

There currently isn’t anything we can do to speed this up, so for now we have to wait for them to complete the work and get us connected again.

Update: We’ve built a temporary solution to the problem

August 19, 2020 Data

Live MBTA Data

mbta boards

Our Large MBTA boards are an update to our first MBTA board in many ways, they are larger, show the whole network, and have moved away from updates every minute, to updates every second.

Updating the board every minute is easy, we just make a vehicle location request to the MBTA API, displaying that data on the board’s LEDs. Updating every second is much more complicated, we can’t use vehicle locations anymore (they only update once a minute), so we have to use departure predictions.

We pull departure predictions from the MBTA API, and then cycle through each one, adjusting the LEDs as the trains are predicted to depart from each station. This make the movement on the board look much more fluid and natural, but does have it’s drawbacks.

  • Trains can go faster or slower than predicted, so the LEDs can jump when the next set of predictions come in.
  • Predictions aren’t available outbound for the last stop on the line, as there aren’t any public departures.
  • We don’t know where vehicles are, just when they are supposed to arrive/leave. Because of this we don’t show trains waiting to depart from their first stop, until they are scheduled to depart.

Despite these limitations, being able to see the trains move around the network in real time is much more engaging, and we think it’s a big improvement.