Over the years, we've covered a few Raspberry Pi plane tracking projects and even one project to track the London Underground but this is the first Manhattan subway train tracker we've come across. Maker and developer Bicapitate, as they're known as over at Reddit, has put together a cool 3D printed map of Manhattan that shows the actual location of the subway trains using optical fiber and LEDs.
The map was designed from scratch by Bicapitate and 3D printed just for this project. It has colored lines that represent each of the transit lines and they are fitted with optical fiber lines along them. These lines are illuminated by RGB LEDs to indicate when a particular train is passing that location. The color of the track does not determine the color but rather the train does so you can tell when a particular train is running on a different track.
There's a bit of customization involved so you can tweak the map to show exactly what you want. For example, you can set up the map to show individual trains or leave them all activated to see where they're all located at a given time. Trains that aren't moving can be hidden, as well. According to Bicapitate, there are two lights used for each station to indicate which direction the train is moving.
The main board running the system is a Raspberry Pi but we're not sure of the exact model. It looks like a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or 4 era machine (the white DSI connector near the micro SD card slot is a good indicator) and this type of project doesn't need a great deal of computational power. The Pi is connected to a couple of matrices that set the color of the optical fiber installed along the tracks. Bicapitate explained that the design process involved creating a vector-based 2D image of the Manhattan transit map which was then used to create a 3D model in OpenSCAD.
The train data is retrieved open from an open server that the city provides. Locations are updated once every 30 seconds so the map is limited by that frequency. The matrix panels are controlled using a library created by Jon-Bright over at GitHub. Beyond that, the software has not been made open source for the project so we're not sure exactly how everything comes together on the Pi.
If you want to check out this Raspberry Pi project in action, head over to the official thread shared to Reddit where you can see a demo video and close up look at the hardware making it all possible.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
