Open-source · build-it-yourself · free software

Live theme park ride wait times, on your desk.

With this open source project you buy about $80 of off-the-shelf parts, flash the free, MIT-licensed software, and build a little 64×32 LED sign that scrolls live theme park ride wait times for the parks you pick. Green when the line is short, red when it isn’t.

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100+Parks worldwide
$0Software
MITOpen source
1Engineer, not a company

The LED display scrolling a ride name with its wait time and an animated icon — Real 3.0 output, rendered from the ScrollKit simulator

What this is

Build this open source scrolling LED box and feel closer to one of your favorite places in the world: the theme park you can't stop wishing you could visit more often.

Open-source software

The ScrollKit 3.0 code is free and MIT-licensed. Run it as-is, read the code, fork it, or make it your own.

You buy the parts

There’s no checkout here. You buy about $80 of off-the-shelf hardware yourself, print the case, and follow the build guide. About 20 minutes to put together.

No Fees, Easily Customizable

This is Michael Czeiszperger’s personal project, shared for makers and theme-park fans: no subscription, no account, no paid cloud service. The story →

What it does

Everything runs on the sign itself: no phone app, no cloud account, nothing to sign into.

Theme park ride wait times

Standby times for 100+ parks from the free themeparks.wiki API, refreshed every few minutes. Colors run green→red by how long the line is; closed and down rides say so.

Animated ride art

Rides carry a tiny hand-drawn 64×32 icon (a boat for Jungle Cruise, a ghost for Haunted Mansion), and in 3.0 they move. Over 80 icons, a dozen animation styles. Because it’s open source, you can make your own for the ride you obsess over.

Effects & transitions

Thirteen screen transitions and animated number reveals (rain, swarm, split-flap) are chosen at random per screen, so the motion never loops the same way twice.

Set up from your phone

First boot opens its own WiFi setup portal. Join it, enter your network, done. Then pick up to four parks and your colors from a web page the sign hosts itself.

Runs unattended

A hardware watchdog reboots the board if it ever wedges, a reboot-loop safe mode keeps the config page reachable, and WiFi self-heals after a power blip. It just keeps going.

Updates itself

New features and ride art arrive over the air from a public GitHub channel: an on-device “Installing…” screen, then a reboot. No subscription, no account, just open-source code you can keep or fork.

Version 3.0

Completely rewritten. Twice as much fun.

3.0 rebuilds the whole thing on ScrollKit, a fault-tolerant LED-matrix library. The result is more robust and more alive: animated icons, cinematic transitions, playful number reveals, and a boot sequence that swarms the letters of “Theme Park Waits” into place.

What’s new in 3.0 How it’s built