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CRASH Space Departure Board
A transit style wall display for a hackerspace
- Role
- Designer and developer
- Tools
- JavaScript, Firebase, Realtime Database, Google Calendar API, Node.js
- Company
- CRASH Space LA
- Year
- 2026
The Departure Board is the wall display at CRASH Space, the hackerspace in Culver City, styled like a transit departure board. It shows bus arrivals for the nearby lines, upcoming events from the space’s calendar, the status of all four 3D printers, the weather, and activity on the space’s Meshtastic mesh, with a clock and info bar along the bottom.
It has 29 themes in nine families, each with its own background and effect layers, and a ruleset picks the theme for the moment. Theme Rules has its own editor to write, test and export that ruleset.
Every panel on the board also works on its own as a widget, so the blog can embed just the bus times or just the printers. The board runs on a mock feed with nothing else switched on, on the LAN server over HTTP, or on a snapshot the community server publishes to Firebase Realtime Database.
