This is an idea that’s been knocking around my brain for a while….
Where’s my bus? An Internet of Things alternative to the smartphone.
Why? When I want to know when the next 210 bus is in the morning, I have go through 9 screens on my iPhone which takes a few minutes to find out when the next buses are (here’s all the screens I have to go through). It’s boring and frustrates me just at the point when I want to leave the house.
The solution? A toy bus and bus stop on my kitchen windowsill will let me know how far it is from the bus stop. I can immediately see whether I have time to catch the next bus or not.
I have chosen this project because I am pretty sure it is achievable, but I am very far from having the skills to do it at the moment so it will push me a lot.
I now need to work out some possible mechanisms – does it go round in circles on a track or is it straight?
Also, I’m interested in whether I can make this from discarded/broken electronics.
I’m starting to collect some useful info on Pinterest
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I started to mock this up in 3D. A bit of a challenge… I started with Rhino but I couldn’t work out how to animate with it so ended up with Blender. Video here.
And here’s a sketch which hopefully explains it better.
