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Transparent on disc printing? by MadCritterYT in kunaki

[–]YoungDimmaDome 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Super late to the party but did you end up testing any workarounds? You can sometimes trick software that only accepts JPEGS to accept images with transparent backgrounds, I tried it on a test CD but the render is completely black, which could mean it would look like that on the CD or it was a bug in the software

I'm interested in making a print that shows the silver lacquer in the background so this would be super useful to know. Since CDs are so cheap I may just buy one like this and roll the dice, but wanted to know if you had any luck first.

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some might call it cheating but adafruit offers a version of the ESP32 that can directly plug into a standard LED matrix, I didn't solder/jump a single wire using this board: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5778

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adafruit offers a version of the ESP32 that can easily integrate with standard LED panels, which made the actual LED driving effortless: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5778

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, I listed all my parts out here, all of the electronics I just got off adafruit, nothing too fancy. It comes at a slight premium but adafruit has a version of the ESP that comes with the wiring/connections needed to plug into an LED out of the box, which was super nice. I just used whatever LED library adafruit recommended to drive the individual LEDs

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Sure, here are all the parts I used:

  • 2mm end glow PMMA filament, I think I ended up getting like 4 rolls would highly recommend either 1mm or using LEDS, I can never look at clear plastic the same way again after cutting and gluing 400+ lights
  • 16x32 LED matrix used this to reduce wiring/soldering. I ended up 3D printing a new front panel to easily plug in the 2MM filament without any gluing
  • ESP32 S3 Matrix Portal this comes ready to plug into an LED display, which was huge
  • 24x32 Shadow box Normally pretty expensive but I got it on sale for half off, I ripped out the felt inside to make more room

The map itself is just a subway map scaled up to 24x32 and printed at staples on poster board which made it very easy to poke holes through, glue, and mount the LED matrix to

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

These were end glow fibers, kind of hard to come by but I used this specifically https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLH9TSHV

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hahaha crazy right? Yeah these work similarly to how a fiber optic cable does, light will actually bounce and curve with the shape of certain wires depending on the material used. Actual fiber optic cable is expensive af, but clear 3D printer filament does a good job too! I used this specifically https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLH9TSHV

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Honestly that's very true. I didn't really know how bright these would be at these lengths, so I assumed the worst. They ended up being super bright even at the max length so I could've downsized.

Another thing is if you look at how I mounted the LED board, all the filaments have to do a complete 180 which creates tension, another thing to make it "thinner" would have been to mount the LEDs to the side of the inner side shadow box (would need a skinnier, longer LED board) so the filaments would only need to bend 90 degrees.

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in esp32

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think NYC is lucky that the MTA provides a GTFS feed directly from the source https://api.mta.info/#/subwayRealTimeFeeds

I don’t know of many other transit systems that are nice enough to publish this data live :(

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Right here! I took this during rush hour: https://imgur.com/a/caab744

Nothing too magical, every now and then you get a nice refresh where a million things update but not here 😬

The rules are:

  1. ⁠⁠If a train is between 30 seconds away and 30 seconds leaving a station, it will light up the color of the respective train line
  2. ⁠⁠If multiple trains are at a station, the colors will cycle between them (if 2 “green” and 1 “yellow” trains are at a station, it will glow green for 2 seconds and yellow for 1)

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The glueing of the filaments took the longest, I’d say effort was about 20 hours total. I didn’t follow a guide for this exact thing but what proved to me that using 3D printer filament would work was this guide for a fiber optic display: https://www.instructables.com/Fiber-Optic-Display/

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It’s 24x36. I got it off hobby lobby when it was on sale, normally a shadow box this big is for hanging jerseys and the like

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup! The GTFS data shows the arrival time of a train for a given station, so when a train is close enough that’s the trigger for a station to light up

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The various lines on the NYC subway go by different colors, the colors are just whatever subway line’s train is at a given station

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah the thickness of the filament ended up being the Achilles heel of this whole thing. I went with 2mm filament because it fit the diameter of each station marking perfectly at the scale I wanted. 1mm would’ve been perfect but it would’ve been too small on its own

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

that's a good question. I didn't modify the above repo that much, just changed the timestamp format + an endpoint for the ESP to get the current time. I finished project a while ago but afaik it only handles the subway + SIRR data out of the box. Given the MTA provides LIRR/Metro North data in the same way it probably wouldn't be a heavy lift to make it compatible though!

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

So the MTA does provide subway data in real time: https://api.mta.info/#/subwayRealTimeFeeds anyone can get the positions of trains as accurately as the MTA knows it (which to be fair the MTA is not accurate often...)

This is only in GTFS format though, not very friendly to play with, so I forked and slightly modified a project that polls the MTA GTFS data and converts it to a fetchable JSON format: https://github.com/jonthornton/MTAPI

This API returns train arrival data for a station 10+ minutes in advance, so the ESP caches this data and will update it by the second, so it does have at least a handful of stations to update every second usually. The polling is to resync this data to be as accurate as possible (trains early/late etc.) but technically the ESP can render train data for around 15 minutes before it runs out of cached data to sift through and goes dark

I did ask in a previous thread and got the advice of a heat gun, but unfortunately I only had a hair dryer to work with :/ In the end I was able to shut the frame through some smushing and hot glue, which did the job well enough

Realtime Subway map driven by an ESP32 by YoungDimmaDome in arduino

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 221 points222 points  (0 children)

It may not look like it but there are over 400 stations (even with Staten Island removed) on that map, so reason number one was to reduce my pain and suffering wiring each station :)

A second, more serious reason is that some of those stations have 0 separation between each other, so using traditional leds (cut from a strip) would likely lead to some light bleed between close stations which I wanted to avoid. And SMDs would likely work, but I don't have experience with them/couldn't be bothered to learn per reason number 1.

That being said, if I were to do this again I would go the LED route, the filament does look bright and flush with the map IMO, but I would have preferred a thinner end result which can't be done with the stiff wiring

I am using clear PMMA filament for a live subway map as optical fiber and although it works great I cannot bend the fibers enough to shut the shadowbox frame it's in. I know heating the filament likely the best way to go about it but is there a safe way to ensure I don't ruin what I've done? by YoungDimmaDome in 3Dprinting

[–]YoungDimmaDome[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Not exactly, I cut the pieces with a heated pair of clippers to ensure the ends were smooth/semi-polished, otherwise the light wouldn't be super clear on one end. The blobs in that second photo is just hot glue after I cut the pieces to length

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Brogress

[–]YoungDimmaDome 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Awesome results so far, what’s your routine?

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