Implementing a Departure Board

August 26, 2023 1:54 AM

I want to follow this tutorial to create my own departure boards for my dakboard showing the departure times at my local train stations.

Dakboard users can create custom widgets with JavaScript and json data. However Transport NSW doesn’t seem to allow API calls with JavaScript (forum post). So it looks like I’m going to have to do this with PHP as per the tutorial.

My question is:
What is the simplest/ cheapest way to do this? I have no experience with PHP or servers. I do have experience with Java, VBA and Linux so can understand some technical stuff.

posted by poxandplague to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: I think that you can use this method within DAKBoard of grabbing the JSON file into your DAKboard to display your requested parameters. DAKboard will be doing the heavy lifting in making and serving the page you want to display so you don’t need the php stuff, but you’ll need to figure out what data points to get by using the documentation of the Open Data API.
posted by photovox at 5:12 AM on August 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

You may be able to do an automatic "scrape" of your local train website with Bardeen.ai, which purports to be a tool that can automate such scraping tasks, and is currently free to use.
posted by kschang at 9:09 AM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks Photovox, that worked and I can see the departures. The times are not showing in my time zone, but that’s a different issue…
posted by poxandplague at 5:12 PM on August 26, 2023 [1 favorite]