A bus-tracking system conceived and designed by students has been held up this Fall due to technical glitches and other delays.
DuTrack, a new GPS-based website designed to track University buses online, will eventually be able to update bus locations every five to 10 seconds. But locations are currently only updating every 30 seconds or more depending on the signal strength of the trackers, said junior Dean Chen, chief operating officer of the Smart Home, who also serves as managing director of online operations for The Chronicle. Trackers have only been installed and powered in certain buses, he added.
“There are only 10 trackers out of 30 that are operating right now,” Chen said. “The other buses just aren’t going to appear on the website right now.”
The DuTrack application uses GPS signals from prepaid Motorola phones installed on each bus to provide the real-time locations of all campus routes, including the Robertson bus and potentially the Bull City Connector. Originally developed by Matt Ball, Pratt ’10, the project was handed down to fellow members of the Duke Smart Home Program and managed by Duke Parking and Transportation Services and the Office of Information Technology.
The efforts to increase the frequency of the updates of the trackers on the phones are ongoing, Chen said. The project members will try a few different solutions, including supplementing the phones’ internal GPS system with more powerful external devices. He anticipates the problem will be resolved within the next few weeks.
“We have had some hiccups here in the past couple of weeks, but the good thing is they are minor technical problems and fixable,” said Sam Veraldi, director of parking and transportation.
When the site initially launched in August, several hundred people accessed the website daily, said DuTrack Project Manager Andrew Brown, a senior who also serves as co-head of mobile development for The Chronicle. He added that though DuTrack was released prematurely, the high volume of traffic spoke to the student demand of a bus-tracking application.
“When we first put it up, it was for us to play around with and test everything,” he said. “We made the mistake initially of putting it as a public website before it was ready.”
In September, the site worked on and off, as the mobile phones underwent technical problems as a result of unsolicited text messages. The Smart Home members had to write new software and install it on the phones in addition to unveiling a new version of the site. But switching over to the new software created a few problems, such as assigning the buses to the correct routes shown online, a process that is done manually by PTS officials, Brown said.
The original code for DuTrack was not designed to accommodate many users and had a high learning curve, Brown said. But the new code has three or four different parts to it and should be able to support the entire Duke community.
The project developers plan to continue expanding the application. Possible additions include predictions of bus arrival times, text versions of the site for cell phone users and an iPhone application.
PTS can also use the data from the tracking system to ensure the correct timing of the buses, said sophomore Chris Brown, Duke Student Government vice president for athletics and campus services.
DSG awarded a $5,000 Student Development Directive grant to fund the project, which will be supplemented by up to $15,000 from Parking and Transportation, Veraldi said.
Andrew Brown said the newest version of DuTrack was created to meet student demand for an operational, effective program.
“Six weeks ago, we had a service and put it up; it worked okay, but it wasn’t necessarily reliable,” he said. “But now, we have a system in place that is well understood and that puts us in a good position going forward.”
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