Over the years, we've covered a few Raspberry Pi plane tracking projects and even one project to track the London Underground but this is the first Manhattan subway train tracker we've come across. Maker and developer Bicapitate, as they're known as over at Reddit, has put together a cool 3D printed map of Manhattan that shows the actual location of the subway trains using optical fiber and LEDs.
The map was designed from scratch by Bicapitate and 3D printed just for this project. It has colored lines that represent each of the transit lines and they are fitted with optical fiber lines along them. These lines are illuminated by RGB LEDs to indicate when a particular train is passing that location. The color of the track does not determine the color but rather the train does so you can tell when a particular train is running on a different track.
