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  • Author Author: kellyhensen
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Episode 441: Raspberry Pi 4 International Space Station Tracker

 

Reminding ourselves that a football-field-sized structure is orbiting around Earth at a speed 10 times faster than what the average bullet leaves a gun, is a good way to keep spaceflight from fading from our collective consciousness. And, although there are apps that can do this for us, tracking when the International Space Station (ISS) is passing right above us makes for a great DIY project. In this video, I combine a Raspberry Pi, a Touchscreen, and an array of LEDs, together with some HTML, JavaScript, and Python, to build a simple Data Visualization device that shows when the next pass of the ISS will be over our location—spoiler alert: it happens more frequently than we might think!

Bill of Material:

Product Name Manufacturer Quantity Buy Kit
Pi Touchscreen NOIR Frame Pimoroni 1 Buy Now
Blinkt! LED Display HAT For Raspberry Pi Pimoroni 1 Buy Now
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, BCM2711 SoC, 4GB DDR4 RAM RASPBERRY-PI 1 Buy Now
Raspberry Pi 7" Touch Screen Display with 10 Finger Capacitive Touch RASPBERRY-PI 1 Buy Now

 

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Raspberry Pi 4 International Space Station Tracker

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  • in reply to mayermakes

    Thanks for the kind words, Clem! It's a nice reminder that a structure the size of a football field passes overhead every ~92 minutes. No objects that I can think of correlate, but it's pretty cool knowing that there are a few people up there. With a different API, we could expand the info displayed to track many of the satellites, planets, and pretty much anything with a known orbit (i plan on revisiting in a future vid!).