Bangle.js Apps: "Spot the (ISS) Station". Is anyone ever working on an App?

Hi guys,

Well, almost everything is in the title ;-)

It would be great to be notified each time the ISS is close to user's location.
A few websites offer free APIs in order to get ISS data such as location, speed, altitude, the number of current crew members, and so on.
One broadly used API is http://open-notify.org/Open-Notify-API/.
If anyone is working on such an App, it would be great to share :-)
If not, I may start the job.

I don't know of anyone - sounds like a great idea though (maybe for other things too?). I wonder if you can data for like a month in advance and upload it?

Sounds like something I would use :)

Maybe include compass to show a direction (and angle?) where to look?

Could be interesting for other objects as well.

• Planets
  
• Star constellations
  

Or visibility of starlink satellites

This is a clever solution. Actually I was planning to use http request to retrieve data once a day or so, and I didn't recall 6LoWPAN was not implemented over bluetooth.
Is there any chance to see IP over Bluetooth in a near future or this won't fit in the memory space?

Is there any chance to see IP over Bluetooth

I think I could make it fit, but there really needs to be a standard that's actually implemented somewhere, or it's useless.

I've been wondering about adding something to Gadgetbridge though - probably just the ability to run a webpage in the background on the phone and then push data from there.

I've been wondering about adding something to Gadgetbridge though - probably just the ability to run a webpage in the background on the phone and then push data from there.

Yes! I can picture several useful applications for that...

Did anyone get round to doing this ISS stuff? pretty interesting. I was looking around the forum for astronomy related projects - I've put together a Clock that calculates planet and sun positions (Alt/Az) based on GPS, will be putting it in the App Loader in the next week once I've sorted a couple things. It doesn't need to interface with any API etc and so I think it's possible to include a spot the station feature with a few more steps. For IIS you'd need to calculate when it's over the horizon, whether it's night time locally and if the Sun is at the right angle as light has to be reflected off it to be visible. The last part in all that carries most of the heavy calculation I think and this clock goes part way for it. The thing with ISS is that it's orbit drifts back and forth and they adjust it with boost so for any projected trajectories calculated - I don't know how long the results would be accurate for so will need to look into that. Worst case though, a settings file could be exposed to kind of reset the projection and orbit every now and then if needed, similar to winding dates at the end of the month on analog watches...this is obvs over the top by comparison and also why it must be done :p

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Tools/orbitTuto­rial.htm

1 Attachment

Sun 2021.01.10

For IIS you'd need to calculate when it's over the horizon

Why not just use the web service provided in the second section of the article referenced in post #1 ? Then it is just a simple JSON parse.

@Robin Just seeing if there’s a way to do it for any location without downloading and uploading files to the watch-I can do it that way for now tho, probably is best way actually. Just means users will need to use separate apps to generate the JSON each month or so and copy the file over which the bangle can look for. The clock app actually stores lat and Lon in its own json so I can make a python script or something that uses that to make it easier.

I look forward to downloading this app @BenJabituya

@DrBard should be there in the next few days once it's gone through all the checks etc. You can get it directly from my repo in the meantime also:
https://jabituyaben.github.io/BangleApps­/#astral
I've not put the ISS aspect in because I need to think about which API to use, it might work better as a seperate app because this one is already trying to do a lot.