SmartDisplay

I got tired of having to rely on third parties (namely Amazon and Google) to supply fun smart display functionalities. Living outside of an MBTA bus stop, I wanted to pull the api to get times when the bus would come. Current features of current smart displays don't even include this functionality. What if I made my own? I bought a $30 Amazon fire tablet and wrote an app to display pernamently on the tablet. There's a mode to keep it on while plugged in; I turned that on too.

(trust me, it looks better without the camera showing the pixels)

Features

• Big persistent time
• Date
• Current weather (temp, feels like, highs/lows, descriptive)
• Weather for the next 6 hours
• NYTimes national news feed
• Arrival times for busses going inbound / outbound from stops specified
• Alternating C and F termperatures
• Rotating images based on current weather
• Increses brightness from 6am-5pm
• Also note: really customized for Fire 7; probably won't work with other tablets because of different resolutions and pixel densities. I probably could have made this responsive, but really didn't feel like it...

Secrets file

The secrets file, secrets.js, stored at the root, has the following format:

export const apiKeyNYT = 'ABCDE';
export const apiKeyDarkSky = 'ABCDE';
export const lat = '11111';
export const long = '11111'; // like 12.1231312
export const busStops = '11111,11111'; // comma separated MBTA stop IDs

You don't need an api key for MBTA; their current rate limiting is totally fine for my purposes.

To run

yarn
yarn start

You'll probably need expo-cli too.

Refresh times

• NYT - every 2 minutes, it pulls; changes the article every 7 seconds
• DarkSky - every 2 minutes
• MBTA - every 10 seconds

Next steps

• Announce the time via a audio recording?

Thanks

• NYT for news data
• DarkSky for weather data
• MBTA for bus data
• Unsplash for background images