In progress
Troute
Live bus tracking, so parents stop having to ask.
The problem
The school runs buses. Parents want to know where the bus is, and the honest answer, every single time, is that nobody knows. Not the office, not the parent, sometimes not even the next stop.
That uncertainty is worse than an inconvenience. A late bus and a lost bus look exactly the same from a parent's front door.
The approach
Troute puts a GPS device on each bus and gives parents a live view during pickup and dropoff. The school gets the operational half. Trip start and end, duration, distance, and route actually taken, plus stop level detail with arrival time, departure time, and how long the bus sat there.
Current status
Research phase complete. I evaluated the hardware options (Teltonika, Queclink, and others) against the platform side (Traccar and Wialon) and settled the stack. Devices are being acquired and the frontend design is underway.
What I am watching for
This is the first thing I have built where a bug has a child standing at a roadside attached to it. That changes the standard. It is not enough for the system to be right most of the time.