PHP: Adding SMS to Trimet TransitTracker was an event that occurred tonight from 6:30-8:00Pm at CubeSpace.

How to Get Portland Trimet arrival times through SMS

Simply text “pdxt {stop_id}” to 368674

For example, texting…

pdxt 8334 to DOTORG (368674) will return results similar to this <—-

Sam Keen demonstrated how he took the existing Trimet TransitTracker service and enabled it with SMS access. This involved building a small ‘Translation’ web service to convert between the Trimet web api and the SMS gateway API.

“You have to build an app that proxies these requests for you,” Keen said.

“People would have a chat client and would be chatting with your system. XMPP response”.

Concerns

Getting the data to the user on time. A fifteen minute delay would make the service relatively less useful.

Security issues, in sending bank data over the phone.

There was discussion about taking this app to higher levels such as allowing texting to get bank balences.

Open Open

At one point, one of the group members pointed out a security risk with the site, to which Sam Keen said he’d have to tell Apache to treat it as php, “It’s Opensource…very open.”

Resources

DotGo.org

CNN News Headlines (cnn.com)
Text “cnn” to the phone number DOTCOM (368266).

Textmarks.com

Uses 41411.

ZeepMobile.com

Uses the code (88147).
You also have to sign up to an API key. Sam Keen says that “They’re pretty new, but definitely worth checking out”.

During the php code demonstration, Keen used Zend Studio for Eclipse, which is not free. However, he recommended NetBeams from Sun Microsystems.

Sam Keen also works on Shizzow, a local Portland Geolocal Social Network system. Read more about him at Portland on Fire, and you can follow him on Twitter.

You can find out more about Trimet through SMS at PDXT.org