BuSMS - Bus schedules, for your sms.

FIRST: lets procrastinate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2akbblhTfbM&t=9s

FORMAT : STOP_ID (BUS_ID BUS_ID)

Story:

• I was standing at the bus stop, wondering when the next bus would come. The stop didn't have the schedule board pinned on and it was frustrating .

• So I came home, tried to scrape translink's pdfs of bus schedules with python when I came across the wonderful Translink APIs.

• Then I remembered about Twilio, a phenomenal service which I encountered in a tech meetup I came mostly for free pizza.

• After 5 hours of hussling (mostly with ORM because Flask =)) ), I finally put up this service. I plan on using it a lot.

TECH INFO

• Hosted on a Google Cloud Instance
• Python + Flask
• Redis caching
• Twilio API: THE BEST sms service for developers: https://www.twilio.com/
• Translink: Translink developer API: https://developer.translink.ca/

Requirements

• Retrieve Translink Developer Key here and put it in `modules/fetcher.py'
• Setup your own Twilio account and set SMS webhook to /sms endpoint in your Twilio console
• Note: Your API must be public

How to run

// installing dependencies
pip3 install flask 
pip3 install requests lxml json redis 
apt-get install redis-* 

// running
python3 -m run flask 

Usage

• The service when sees a new stop_id will fetch data from Translink API

• It will then store the data in redis, along with the current timestamp. For the next 5 minutes, if there is a new request, the service will use the pre-loaded data from redis. (This will leave less load on Translink as well as making Busms faster)

• There are some parsing, so that you can use bus ids after typing stop id. This will return data of specified buses.

Future plans

• I have some python news scrapers that I will integrate in this service, so I can check my email, school mails, school notifications... (this is why I chose Python)

• I plan to play more with twilio, as their service are amazing and I don't have internet connection on my phone, so I rely a lot on sms.

THANK YOU:

• Translink for their wonderful developer api

• Twilio for their great sms service, trial account (I'm poor) that last for more than 300 messages.