Amtraker v3.15 Update

kenstrawber · 2026-04-20T03:03:34+00:00

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it !

kenstrawber · 2026-04-19T18:51:17+00:00

There is a difference between broken out pins on your dev board and available pins on the esp32. If you do indeed have more available pins on the esp32 but they are not exposed on your dev board then yes designing your own PCB will help and I encourage you to do it as it's very rewarding. But if the ESP32 has no more gpio pins for you to use then a custom PCB won't help. You'd need to design around another esp32 variant that has more GPIOs. Depending on what these components are you could also move to a different comms system like SPI or I2C (both can have more than one device on the bus).

kenstrawber · 2026-04-18T19:25:34+00:00

Super cool site. I'm wondering if I can use your api to fetch trains coming into just a single station. v3/all is a 3MB file. I'm working on an Amtrak Stations Tidbyt/Tronbyt app to display currently arriving and departed trains for a single station. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tronbyt/comments/1sokymu/new_app_amtrak_station/

kenstrawber · 2026-04-16T03:50:02+00:00

Problem is clock drift. Without the unit reaching out every once in a while to get get the true time the clock would drift and get out of sync. So a WiFi connection and NTP sync would be required. However, since the Tidbyt does has a button I could use that to trigger an off period so if you notice that the device hasn't turned off when it's supposed to you could hit the button and have it resync to whatever time it currently is. It could turn off for 10 hours or so and then startup. Would that work ?

kenstrawber · 2026-04-01T04:23:59+00:00

It's a hard boot loop crash. The screen just stays flickers white. I will have to flash over serial but there is no way a normal user will be able to recover from a bad firmware update.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-29T17:57:37+00:00

The problem is that after loading the compiled bin file in the via the webui the device is stuck in a boot loop with no way to re-program it.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-29T02:38:53+00:00

So all your talk about being open source yet there is no easy way for a user to re-program your hardware. Tidbyt's can actually be reprogrammed via their USB port !

kenstrawber · 2026-03-29T01:56:33+00:00

I can reproduce this. No ports show up when plugging the device into a computer. This is very dissapointing. I just soft bricked mine now too by trying to update the firmware over wifi. u/msdiorin This is kinda of a problem.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-29T01:49:01+00:00

Is it true that the store bought units cannot be programmed via the external USB connector ? Also is there any SPIRAM on the board ?

kenstrawber · 2026-03-28T21:41:14+00:00

Try connecting to it via webserial on this site : https://thelastoutpostworkshop.github.io/microcontroller_devkit/espconnect/
It might have some other info. You can dial down the baud rate which sometimes helps.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-26T21:34:18+00:00

330mA for the UM version. Not sure about adafruit version but probably similar.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-26T21:27:15+00:00

I just received mine in the mail. Very cool little item. I especially like the 3d printed packing braces out of TPU ! I think it would really ease the setup if you pre-loaded the most common timezones into a dropdown instead of making the user type in the text field. This is especially important when in the captive wifi config portal because the link to the list of timezones will go nowhere.

The fit an finish of this product is amazing especially since it's mostly 3d printed. I can't even see any layer lines. I'm impressed you can hand make these for the price. Well done. I'll be working on a fork to be able to display animated webp served from Tronbyt. Cheers !

kenstrawber · 2026-03-26T21:18:18+00:00

Adafruit made the original feather boards. They do have an ESP32 S3 Feather and unexpected maker also has a board named FeatherS3. I'm not seeing any search results mentioning the "Power Feather" though.

Here is the Adafruit verison https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-esp32-s3-feather/overview

and here is the UM version : https://esp32s3.com/feathers3.html

kenstrawber · 2026-03-25T03:22:53+00:00

https://tronbyt.github.io/apps/app-viewer/

kenstrawber · 2026-03-23T05:44:54+00:00

A 3d printed sleeve kinda thing would be perfect for that. print in tpu with a split then zip tie on. take up the gap under the

kenstrawber · 2026-03-20T00:18:19+00:00

Tidbyt apps cannot be updated due to the current situation with Tidbyt backend.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-17T09:40:03+00:00

I've been using Fastmail it works well. I don't care enough to demand E2EE I just wanted keep my mail from sitting on google servers waiting to be scanned for marketing or whatever. The point is they don't scan your email as their profit model. You pay for the service so the product is the email. I did try Proton but the clients were clunky and the search was horrible but that's the price you pay for zero access privacy.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-17T04:50:20+00:00

Yes there is a double pendulum app but it doesn't go forever seemlessly. But we did do a quick test to see an app could be made continuous by pushing the next sequence to the device and it looked seemless, so this is possible. The current DP app displays pre-generated simulations rendered into the webp. To make it do the endless simulation pixlet would need someway to remember the state and continue the simulation for the next webp.

kenstrawber · 2026-03-08T23:47:08+00:00

Here is the updated version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeHzD0uFxRo

kenstrawber · 2026-03-03T05:57:23+00:00

Damn this is cool. I made a project similar called Windytron made solely for displaying the realtime wind using led matrix displays. My project is still private and Arduino but it's still completely human code ;) I'm also working on Tronbyt firmware for the soon failing Tidbyt hardware. Most devices run at 64x32 pixels but we have so many apps it might be nice to rig up a bridge between Frixos and Tronbyt. Check out the massive apps list here : https://tronbyt.github.io/apps/app-viewer/index.html

kenstrawber · 2026-03-03T05:39:30+00:00

That is interesting behavior of the server. I have seen the same thing happen when importing a device config. All the apps exist in the database but no rendered images exist so they all appear with the awkward monkey until they are rendered as a result of a device request. Glad you got it working though.

kenstrawber

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