September 23, 2020

I did a lot of backend website modifications, including re-ordering of my Git repos for my projects.

Though I haven’t gotten all of the older projects up and running, one particular new project I have up is the ISS Location Receiver based script that pulls in the longitude, latitude, and Unix timestamp of when the ISS Space Station is overhead.

This means that you can monitor it going over your house over the course of the day.

For now, you can pipe in these longitude, and latitude coordinates into a search engine to figure out where it currently is.

You can find out more about the “ISS-Location-Now” API through the documentation here: http://open-notify.org/Open-Notify-API/ISS-Location-Now/

I’m planning on somehow incorporating this with “Leaflet” to provide a real-time map in a webpage as well to keep it relevant: https://leafletjs.com/

Anyway, you have to celebrate the small wins, as this helped me learn how to save a JSON request file (“iss_location.json”) locally, and each time you press the “Click Here To Display Current ISS Space Station”, an AJAX request is performed so only that portion of the page is refreshed.

This means that it doesn’t have to reload the page in order to display JUST that information since it pulls all of the information from the JSON file that I obtain every minute via the Python 3 based requests module.

Keep having fun,

Sam