Hey - I wrote the original code that was forked (exquisitely, I should add!) by Balena. The original code is just a Python script.

I haven’t written it up into a blog yet, but everything to get you started is on my GitHub at https://github.com/chrishutchinson/train-departure-screen. Very happy to help answer any questions too

Thanks for the inspiration!

I agree, what is the benefit of running balena here? You have Pi Zero, OLED screen (SPI library), and some code to access a 3rd party API.

For me, repeatability and ease of management - I used to be really demotivated by having to start from scratch with a Raspbian install whenever I built a project but all the prebuilt base images for different languages/OS and configuration as code due to Docker make the Pi so much nicer to use for stuff like this.