Follow along.

How a station works

A station is a small, low-cost computer with a microphone, placed where a question needs answering. A watch is a piece of software on that station, tuned to one signal. At 9 Mile & Hilton, the watch listens for the crossing's warning bell: it picks the bell out of traffic and weather, decides when the gates are down, and logs each blockage with its start, end, and duration.

One station can run several watches at once, and a new question doesn't need new hardware — the question travels to the station as software, and only its answers travel back. There are no cameras and no feed from the railroad, and every answer goes to a shared, open record.

What's public, what's not

A station turns sound into answers, and only the answers travel. What reaches the public record is deliberately narrow:

• Public: blockage times and durations, plus a compact fingerprint — a handful of measurements describing the sound, not the sound itself.
• Stays at the station: the raw audio. It's analysed on the device and never uploaded; any saved clips stay local, and the live feed is reachable only over a private network, never the open internet.

Heimdall listens for the crossing bell, not for people — there's no camera, and the talk and traffic around the station aren't recorded or sent anywhere. Sign up for alerts and all we keep is your Telegram ID, the name on your Telegram profile, and your alert preferences: no email, phone, or location. Station owners who create an (optional) owner account add one thing to that list: an email address, stored only so they can sign in.

Could you run your own? (not yet)

That's where this is headed, but it isn't a product you can buy today. The hardware is inexpensive and the software runs from a single script, so in principle a station is something you could set up and point at your own crossing — or your own question. Turning that into a kit anyone can plug in and leave running — and proving the whole citizen-sensing idea works — is still ahead of us. If that's interesting, tell us and we'll keep you posted.

Sign up for updates

We're at the very start. If you want to follow along — or you've got a crossing, a noisy corner, or a question a station could answer someday — send a note and we'll keep you posted as Heimdall grows.