Satellite Tracker

by shubham_bhatt in Circuits > Arduino

9300 Views, 30 Favorites, 0 Comments

Satellite Tracker

IMG_20150103_012053.jpg
Did you know that we can see International Space Station and other awesome satellites with our naked from earth.

This instructable will tell you how to spot the iss when they are above your location.

What Dose It Do

temp_165755167.jpg
This device tells you when ISS (International Space Station) is above your location and details like date,day,time and duration for how long it will be up there so that you can go out and see it for yourself.
The idea is based on the project ISS above which is made using rasberry pi and has tons of cool features live video stream from iss unfortunately rasberry pi is very expensive in the countries outside usa so. This is my attempt to recreate the project for arduino users. Have fun
------------—--------------------------------
Here is the link of working video

http://instagram.com/p/xXd0lcPY5A/

What Do I Need

****notice****

For those who do not have materials or any source of getting them do not worry just go to the next step

You actually do not need anything to spot the ISS and other satellites

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



1. Pyhton 2.7 (free)
2. download feedphaser library for python (free)
3. Arduino (maybe $25)
4. LCD
5. Laptop
6. Absolutely no coding exprience
7. Faith
8. Courage to complete this project


Lack of Resources

Do not worry, there are actually many websites and app that tells you the location of the satellites.

I have listed few below you can use them

other satellites

NASA

Lets Begin

LCD_bb.png
We will setup our arduino in this step

Connect the LCD with arduino using the wiring diagram.

To run the LCD you will need to download LiquidCrystal library for arduino.

You do not need potentiometer it just ther to control the brightness.You can remove it by connecting the wires to positive terminal.

After making all the connections use this arduino code
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v66k2wtmap2s19e/arduinocode.ino?dl=0

Setup Python

IMG_20141220_204445.jpg


1. Download Python
2. Download feedparser


Download and install these.


After installing use this python code

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yac5f5qgg9k4irj/pythoncode.py?dl=0

Connect Arduino to Python

IMG_20141231_004309.jpg


1. Upload the arduino sketch to the device
2. Find the port number of the arduino
3. you check it in the arduino IDE in serial monitor
4. Now change the port number in the python code mine was COM3 yours might be different so change it to connect the arduino to python.


__________________________________________________

It dose not matter if you are using any IDE for python or not it will connect.

Before interfacing python with arduino first close Arduino IDE or it might show any error

Need Help

IMG_20141231_005020.jpg
If it dose not work I am always here eager to help.I am also a noob not a python expert it will be really cool if you guys can make this project better. If any of you make this plz do tell me give me a facebook msg,instagram or any other way you want to communicate and send me some pictures.

Do This Before Running Python Code

Go to NASA's spot the station website
And type your location and search when iss is going to be above your location. After that you have to subscribe to thier iss feed for your location and copy the link of this rss feed into the python code without this code will not run........ Python code will extract the data from rss feed and then send to arduino to display it
also download feedphaser library for python
Spotthestation.nasa.gov