Train-inator

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  PI's acting as physical train stations. Yellow / Blue wires to communicate with the controller. Green / Red for "tracks". Orange/Brown = GND

Inspiration

Last weekend we have massive difficulties travelling to and from Durham due to trains being cancelled. The issue with the UK's train system is that train rerouting takes a long time to calculate and can lead to hours of delays in travel times. We wanted to make a system that would automatically reroute trains if a track was down.

What it does

We have decided to split up and tackle two problems. Alex has worked on scheduling trains between the stations based on the amount of passengers who want to travel from each station. An optimised route is calculated based on the trains current location and includes weighting from the "physical distance" and "passenger weighting". Ryan has worked on a more physical side, building a physical network of train stations and developing a protocol for these stations to communicate with each other.

How we built it

A lot of pain. API made using chalice Custom protocol made with blood, sweat and tears

Challenges we ran into

Grounding pins Making raspberry pi ip addresses static

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sending data over GPIO pins. Using statistical AI to find the best route with all factors taken into consideration

What we learned

Don't do hardware at a hackathon.

What's next for Train-inator

We will create the infrastructure to login to train stations through qr codes, or facial recognition when walking into a train station which will be the future of train travel.

Built With

• gpio
• python