Man builds DIY train station departure board

The available plans only display U.K. information, but can likely be tweaked as needed. Credit: Jon Morris Smith / YouTube Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. There’s something oddly calming about gazing up at a train station departure board. Maybe it’s the pixelated glow from the lights, the regularly revolving stream of information, or the knowledge that you’re about to sit back and let the rails take you to your destination. Sadly, that specific type of train lounge aesthetic is usually only found in the stations themselves. Not content to leave it at that, DIY YouTuber Jon Morris Smith recently designed a homebrew version of a departure board. The final result isn’t a cool-but-useless replica, either. With a little bit of coding work, Smith got his LED matrix setup to display all of the info for his own travels. Raspberry Pi Departure Board “Being a life-long train fan I’ve always wanted my own departure board, and as a regular commuter one which shows my usual route,” he wrote on his website, Another Partial Success. While Smith perused premade LED dot-matrix screens for sale, they were a bit too expensive for his taste or required a subscription fee to use. “My thought—How hard can it be? And here we are,” he added. As with so many DIY electronics projects, Smith’s train display relies on a 1GB Raspberry Pi 4 that is then connected to a matrix board and four LED, 128-by-64 pixel matrices. The whole rig runs on a 5 volt, 5 amp power supply to ensure a steady display on the screens. From there, it’s simply a matter of configuring the Raspberry Pi 4 to run the proper programs including a custom departure board software, and subscribing to Rail Data Marketplace for the real-time information. However, there is a caveat to the Smith’s available version. Rail Data Marketplace is a UK-based service, so it won’t be able to give you any train info for the United States. That said, it probably only takes a little bit of fine-tuning using a domestic option on a website like Train Tracking to fix the issue. And even if you don’t use it to keep an eye on your next departure time, it’s still a cool accessory to enjoy at home. 2025 PopSci Best of What’s New The 50 most important innovations of the year