Seb's weblog

Le vélo Star is a public bicycle rental service provided by Keolis for the city of Rennes and it opened last year. At first, data were not provided officially, although one could look at the source of their google maps use to see that a list of station was available as a XML file and detailed informations were in HTML fragments. However, Rennes Métropole has decided to open up its data and the first step in this direction was done early this week by Keolis Rennes providing an API for Le Vélo Star.

So, I wanted to do something with it. Building a google maps stye application would have been easy but I tried for something different. I first started by building a script that would collect and store the data (number of bikes and slots available for each station) using RRD. Graphs are nice, but it wasn’t helping much seeing the whole picture. So instead, using a background image generated from OpenStreetMap I built a time-lapse animation of the stations’ usage.

All the code I wrote is available on my Github repository, except for the animation bit, were I currently used iMovie.

First part was assumed by Deadcell and maybe they should have abstained. Some kind of Ministry/KMFDM sound, mostly with a (bad) recorded backtrack and strange videos in the background (I had a problem associating correctly the images of Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Religion and the USA, but that may be just me). The girls on guitars were kinda cute, but I spent maybe 5 mins trying to see if their instruments were plugged in.

Punish Yourself may be uglier, but at least they sounded far better (even if this time I had a doubt with the drummer vs the backtrack). They were screaming, painted, flaming and moving the people around and that was good. Soundwise, they’re a bit of mix between punk, rockabilly (I’m pretty sure to have clearly heard that influence in one or two songs) and hard techno. Stage-wise, it was also really nice to watch: lasers, flames and body paint.

Overall, it was just a bit short (1h and 1:25 respectively) but it felt good in the end.