Realizing the paperless station with E-Paper was the basic idea and the entry of e-paper technology into the field of public transport. Due to the strong pressure of the market to be able to display real-time, the feature of the paperless station was pushed back into the background in the early days of e-paper technology. After the real-time and e-paper had prevailed technologically, the desire came back to the fore.
The clear goal for us was to use the digital medium of E-Paper for the timetable notice. In such a way that the timetables are automatically transmitted to the E-Paper Display if there is a change. No manual activity, no paper logistics and never again no up-to-date timetables.
A timetable software manufacturer such as Mentz provides the timetable data for the posted timetables to a stop point in the form of raw XML data and PDF files. From this raw data, the timetable images are created in the corresponding layout via a php script. Since timetables usually have a longer validity period, a query and synchronization daily in the early morning hours will be sufficient. New timetables are only transferred to the devices in the event of changes. The required parameters for this URL query is conveniently entered in the next:urban control center. All required input parameters are stored there, which can be easily entered when creating a new Object. These parameters are then used as part of the URL in the queries. The result (the XML file) of these queries is stored in the /Data/ directory of the Object and read in from there by the processing script and reused.