I had a problem:
Baby, it’s cold outside!
We all encounter a range of everyday problems in our lives, both large and small. At Wunderdog we’re no different, but we do have the advantage of being excellent problem solvers with some pretty advanced technical skills — helping us to find innovative answers to some of life’s tricky problems.
A chilly problem
Finnish winters are cold, and I commute by tram — and even though Helsinki’s public transport is pretty punctual, I am not. This often leads to me seeing the rear lights of the tram disappearing over the horizon while I freeze my toes off waiting for the next one. One day I decided that I’d suffered for long enough; there had to be a way that this could be avoided.
The first ideas I came up with were:
- digging a tunnel to avoid the freezing air
- developing a system that would stop the tram and make it wait until I was on it
Great ideas, right? But unfortunately, impossible — and probably illegal too.
A just-in-time solution
Being a pretty nerdy guy, I buy all kinds of gadgets even if I don’t know what I’ll use them for, so I happened to have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around with an 8” display. As a software developer, I know how to make computers beep, and I also knew that Helsinki provides an open API for the public transport system, which lets you track tram movements and schedules in real time.
This was an open-source project by Luffis, supported by Wunderdog — find out more here.
Wonder what other problems we’ve faced? Read Paco’s one here.
More about Wunderdog.
