Departure boards riders can trust.
A frozen “2 min” is worse than no display at all. Every design decision in our display stack starts from that failure mode — and prevents it.
From a single stop to the whole network
Address a display at any level of your system: a single stop, a route, several entities at once, an agency, or the whole network. Each display is a small config entity you can deploy through version control, or spin up ad hoc from a URL.
- Stop displays — shelter screens and platform boards
- Route & system boards — operations rooms, transit centers
- Variants as skins — LCD, e‑ink, mobile, or your own via a hook
- Multi-screen surfaces — one stop across two coordinated panels, page-flipping in lockstep
# A saved, deployable display /gtfs/display/{context} # Ad hoc: any GTFS entity, straight from the URL /gtfs/display/stops/4021 /gtfs/display/routes/17 # Two screens, one stop, synchronized paging /gtfs/display/stops/4021/pd1/top /gtfs/display/stops/4021/pd1/bottom
When the data goes stale, the display says so.
Connectivity in the field fails — cellular modems drop, backhauls flap, feeds hiccup. What matters is what the screen does next.
- Staleness banner — after a couple of missed polls, riders see “Updated X min ago” — never a frozen “2 min.”
- Graceful degradation — after minutes offline, live countdowns are withdrawn and scheduled times take over, clearly labeled.
- Offline shell — a service worker keeps the display booting and rendering through outages, with last-known-good data from local storage.
Runs for years on the kiosk you already own.
Field hardware is old, underpowered, and rarely rebooted. The display frontend is a dependency-free vanilla JavaScript micro-app — no framework, no runtime dependencies — compiled to a single small bundle with flat CSS.
- Low memory, low CPU — DOM updates are diffed and keyed; no virtual-DOM churn.
- Lockstep paging — page rotation is derived from the clock with skew correction, so banks of screens flip together.
- Backoff & jitter — polite polling that recovers smoothly and never stampedes your API.
Tools for the operations team
- Annotations & overrides — pin a note to a stop (“Board across the street this weekend”) or redirect predictions to a temporary stop, scheduled by time windows.
- Fleet telemetry — every display phones home with heartbeats and error events; last-seen tracking shows you what's dark before riders do.
- Per-display permissions — public kiosks get exactly the access they need, nothing more.
- Technician debug overlay — permission-gated diagnostics on the device itself: live state, data freshness, region boundaries.
Put your feed to work.
Bring your feed and your hardware inventory — we'll bring the software that keeps them honest.