Put a live departure board on a TV, tablet or any screen

You can put a live departure board on TV, a spare tablet, a laptop or an office screen with nothing more than a web browser. The quickest way is TrainTicker's free live demo: open it, type your station, go full screen and leave it running. If you own a TrainTicker LED board, the dashboard also gives you a full-screen board and a shareable link for exactly this, for a TV, a tablet on the wall or someone else to follow. One account, many screens.

The quick way: the free demo

The live demo is free and needs no signup. Type a station or tap one of the shortcuts and you get the departures laid out like a station board, using live data from National Rail's Darwin system. It covers every National Rail station in Great Britain, so it works as well for Glasgow Central as it does for a two-platform station in the Cotswolds.

That's enough to try the idea. Put it on the kitchen tablet for a week and see whether the household actually looks at it. If people start saying "the 07:48's running late" before anyone's touched a phone, you've got your answer.

It's also a decent way to keep an eye on somewhere you're not. Parents waiting for a student coming home from Leeds, say, or someone collecting a friend off the train at Bristol Temple Meads, can leave that station's board up and watch the expected time settle as the train gets closer. Our guide to what the status words mean helps when the board starts saying Delayed.

The full-screen board and share links

TrainTicker owners get more from the dashboard. Under share and full screen, you can get links to your board for other screens. The browser board shows the same departures as your LED board, with your filters applied: the station you travel to, your platforms, and the walking time that hides trains you can't reach.

Double-click the board to go full screen. Where the browser supports it, the page also asks the screen to stay awake, which saves a lot of fiddling with settings.

Share links are handy for:

• a TV in the living room or kitchen
• a tablet mounted by the front door
• a screen in an office or shared workspace near a station
• a family member who catches the same trains but lives elsewhere

Which screens work?

Anything with a modern web browser, broadly. The table gives the usual suspects.

If you like a project, a Raspberry Pi running a browser in full screen is a neat way to drive a spare monitor. It's the same idea, just with more tinkering.

How do you stop the screen going to sleep?

Most devices want to save power, which is the enemy of an always-on board. A few things help:

1. Keep the device plugged in.
2. Turn off auto-lock or screen sleep in its settings.
3. On a laptop, set it not to sleep when the lid is closed if it's driving a TV.
4. Use the full-screen board, which asks the browser to keep the screen awake where it can.

One word of caution on TVs. OLED screens can suffer burn-in from static images left up for long periods, and a departure board has fixed elements. If your TV is OLED, use it for the board when you need it and turn it off afterwards. For something on all day, a tablet or an LED board is the safer bet.

Screen or LED board?

A spare screen costs nothing if it's already in a drawer, and the demo costs nothing either. That makes it a great way to start. Where a dedicated board wins is the boring stuff: it's always on, it doesn't need charging or a sleep setting, it's small enough for a shelf, and it dims itself to 15% between 10pm and 7am.

TrainTicker's board is 320 by 80 mm, about the length of a ruler, with amber LEDs laid out like the board on the platform. It's £199.99 once with no subscription, and it comes with the same dashboard, filters and share links. There's a fuller look at the options in how to get live train times at home, and at the board itself in what is a home train departure board.

Start with the free demo on whatever screen you have. If the habit sticks, you can order the LED board and keep the screens for when you want the big version.