Transhuh

2024 • rust • school • dbus

A tool for displaying notifications when a TransLoc bus is at a specific location.

This tool came from frustration with the bus system my school provides. We do get a live map of the entire route but what I want is a way to know when a bus is nearby so I know when to leave!

To fix this, I simply reverse-engineered the API of the live web view of the buses and made my own program to query it (I think I can do this, the API requires no auth).

The program is passed a series of locations (called points of interest) by their latitude and longitude. Using these the program then sends a notification whenever a bus is at one of these points of interest.

This is in my opinion where Rust really helped me. Easily parsing the API responses and renaming the properties with serde, parsing CLI args with clap, and making it all error safe with anyhow was very easy that I was able to complete this program in one section of my calculus class.

I want to expand this in the future to maybe a Discord bot or something I can run to get cross-platform notifications.