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Pyportal ISS Display

A pyportal based ISS display project

colonwqcolonwq
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I developed a Pyportal project which displays the position of the ISS on a map of the Earth.

I developed a learning project for the Adafruit Pyportal. This has been collecting dust on my desk since I received my Adabox.

My initial attempt was to use the Google Map API to generate a downloadable map with the ISS location as the center. This was not successful as it seems the Adafuit.io image converter does not support generated maps.

My second attempt was to use a downloaded Mercator projection image of the Earth and display the current location of the ISS. 

I found lat-long to Mercator project code here. 

I look up the location of the ISS here. 

I found the map from here. 

I cribbed code from the Adafruit Pyportal code base and from here. 

Issues

* The lat-long to x-y conversion is not perfect. I may add a fudge factor or change my path. 

Code

The code and source BMP file are published in my github page. It should be in the links section of this web area. 

iss-tail-portal.jpg

A picture of the pyportal with a generated ISS current and 30 minute historical location.

JPEG Image - 1.83 MB - 11/11/2019 at 00:25

Preview

iss-tail-web.png

A screenshot of the ISS location and future/pass orbit.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) - 626.73 kB - 11/11/2019 at 00:24

Preview

  • Updates to my ISS tracker.

    colonwq • 11/11/2019 at 00:32 • 1 comment

    I updated the github code to do the following:

    1. Display a 32x32 bitmap of the ISS at the current calculated location
    2. Display a trail of dots for the previous ISS locations. 

    Notes:

    The displayio.Group() structure can work like a stack. The history stack has a depth of 30. I pop off the first element when the length is 30 and then add a new one. 

    The ISS bitmap is offset 16x16 so the image is centered on the calculated X-Y instead of the top left corner. 

    My math seems to be a bit off with respect to the calculated X-Y. The history tail and the orbit from https://wheretheiss.at/ do not align. I have included a screen shot of each. I may increase the history to 90 so that a complete orbit can be visualized. Maybe the X-Y can be fudged.... or the path is wrong. 

    :wq

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Dan Maloney wrote 11/05/2019 at 00:56 • point

I've got a PyPortal sitting here doing nothing, so now I have something for it to do. Thanks!

  Are you sure? yes | no

colonwq wrote 11/05/2019 at 16:34 • point

While searching for doing display related stuff, I found an adafruit learning post doing this same thing. They used the Pyportal object for display init, WiFi, url fetching and json conversion. Their display even has a tail because the displayio.Group is worked as a stack for the dots. This is a good learning experience though.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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