Internally we’ve been talking about larger traintrackr products for a while now, our biggest is currently the Large London board at 300mm x 400mm, but we want to go bigger. We do have some products in development that are bigger than this, but they are still going to fit in your living room.
Last year we were approached to make a very large traintrackr for the new Trainline office in central London, which was a good opportunity to build something big. We had a couple of conversations and some ideas were thrown around. Their first suggestion was to build a map 10m wide and 3m tall, all from circuit boards, showing all the trains running in Europe.
Thankfully we managed to get the project down a manageable scale, and settled on a map of the Thameslink network, on a 3.5m x 1.2m metal enclosure using 20mm RGB LEDs. This was doable, it suited their budget, it wasn’t going to take years to complete, and it involved a very well defined transit map.
Thameslink is a national rail route, and so we first had to get access to national rail live train arrivals. Like every other transit network they used their own unique APIs and schema. The one we chose was a SOAP API, and gave us departure board data for each station. This we could process to get the location of all the trains on the Thameslink network, and form the base of our live map. Once we had the data, and the map layout from thameslink, we were able to draw out the design in CAD and spec out the metalwork.
The spec called for a 3.5m wide metal enclosure, but with a service elevator measuring only 2m long (and a 1.75m powder coating limit with the metalwork manufacturer) we had to split this into 2 enclosures measuring 1.75m each, mounted side by side. The final metalwork consisted of two metal frames mounted to the walls, and then 2 metal doors on hinges, that would have the holes for the LEDs.
The lines and station names were added in white vinyl at our office, before we took the complete set of parts up to London for the install. Once attached to the wall we installed the 560x LEDs, and wired everything together. The processor part of the circuit board we installed, including the firmware, is very similar to a regular traintrackr, it’s just the scale of the LEDs that is significantly larger than our current lineup of products.
Everything went to plan, and we’re really happy with the way it came out. The white lines and text contrast well with the black powder coated enclosure, and it’s fun seeing a live traintrackr so large.
If you are interested in a large traintrackr like this then let us know. For those of you interested in something just a bit bigger than our current products, keep an eye out later this year.