TomTom Mapping API – GIS Interests

This well written article, as well as teaching me some Imageio, sparked an idea to use this on my Raspberry PI to inform my wife of the quickest route to take to her work based on the two main routes considering TomTom’s traffic feature. It should be said TomTom allows for 5 routes in any API call, however this is overkill for her route and both her current routes have roughly 5 minutes travel time difference.

Shout out should be given to TomTom for the sheer volume of call parameters which it can give. Many are very very nieche but I guess useful for someone! Well worth exploring and easy to develop and get an API key without needing any payment set-up initially.

To make this as simple as possible given the morning rush to get out the door as fast as possible the premise is the PI will be only connected to 2 lights, 1 for each route which will turn on depending on which is faster. This would allow for her to know which route to take at a simple glance. The calls itself to the API are limited in time to when she roughly leaves, which also stays within the developer API limit and are not required to run all day!

I may improve this in future so it only flags if traffic on her preferred (usually quickest) route pushes the travel time 5 mins to more than what her least preferred second route travel time would be.

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