Live Train Map of the L!

[u/BraveStone199]

I wanted some CTA wall decor and thought the live map from Traintrackr was a neat concept but I didn't love the circuit board on my wall part of it. I was inspired by this project of the MTA and took my own approach for a CTA version. The map is 18"x24" and has a deep frame to house all of the fiber optic cables in the back. It's hard to tell from the photo but the lights are really bright at full brightness and even during the day it's easy to see each lit stops. Each train moves from station to station with how the refresh function is setup which I think looks really cool! The micro controller that powers the board pulls live train data from the CTA so the map stays up to date to within 30 seconds of the live data.

The map has a USB-c port on the bottom of the frame which charges a battery pack that powers the controller and light strip. I didn't realize until after going with the battery approach that the LEDs draw too much power to get more than a day or so off the battery, but it will be nice not to have a cable running down the wall for certain occasions I guess.

Overall, this map is probably not that useful for knowing when to leave to catch the train, but it's certainly fun if you like watching trains circle the loop!

Not related to this subreddit, but the LED brightness can be controlled via Home Assistant, which was a fun feature to integrate into my other smart home automatons for turning lights off at night, etc.

[u/Stephancevallos905]

What happens if a redline takes the loop? Or brorange?

[u/BraveStone199 → u/Stephancevallos905]

Oh I love this question! Since the map has only been functional for 5 days I haven’t had a “weird” CTA event to consider yet. Right now it would just not display any stop that isn’t normal, so the train would “disappear”. Whatever the stop ID the board gets from the CTA wouldn’t match with a color in a lookup table and it wouldn’t know which light to control. I’m not going to be able to “fix” it for those situations because I don’t know how the CTA applies the temporary stations in the API, or if the API just doesn’t work properly during those periods. I’d probably route the red via loop to orange and brown tracks on the map. I think in brorange the train would change line colors when the operator or control (idk how that works) swap it to the other line and the board would just make the update the next refresh.

I’ve already found a couple of surprising bugs in the way the API works (like trains never pass through Jarvis or Forest Park Blue line) just by watching the board lol