Quite
often when there is some nice API for something, the obvious
application type seem to be a mobile application or somekind of web
site/app. That is all quite nice and all but sometimes you just need a
simple tool. Probably most Linux (or unix) user spend most of their time
in a terminal so why not make some tiny command line utilities instead ?
My latest little project is all about the command line.
Tools to query Turku Region public transport data from the command
line, fast and much more efficient than opening a browser, finding the
site and all that. For now there are two tools:
- tkuftop: for the bike rental system showing real-time statistics about bike availability at the stations.
It can also dump rack location the information as CSV and PostGIS
SQL statements for easy import into any system. There is also support
for relaying the information to an MQTT broker.
- tkufstop: and one for real-time bus stop departure information.
These tools are simple and compact, written in C with a little
help from curl and json-c.
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| tkufstop showing departues from stop T9 |
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| tkuftop showing bike rack availability information |
And of course everything is
open source and available on github.
