ISS Alert- should this work?

Flyover is not plausible.
According to the European Space Agency, the Station is east of Japan when my timer is at zero.

To whit-

Oh-Oh-Oh- the LEDs came on! jUst wront.
Wow cool

Way off. It’s telling me there’s a second sighting, but it’s pretty close to Buenos Aires. Not Silicon Valley at all

.Live Space Station Tracking Map | Spot The Station | NASA

So, the LEDs work now? Given they came on at the overhead time? But the overhead time seems to be incorrect still?

You are using @pfeerick’s “etc/utc” timezone in the getCurrentTime() function and not “America/LosAngeles”?

If you are using LA, then you are adjusting the returned unixtime by adding negative raw_offset?

Please confirm. Thanks.

Cheers,
Norm.

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The answer to that question is simply you don’t touch it! :stuck_out_tongue: There is zero reason to change the timezone in this code… everything is sourced and calculated in UTC.

Indeed they are. That’s on the agenda for my next tinkering session on Sunday. Thanks for the hint about Org_01… I’ll try that first.

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know what you are seeing, but every time I have looked at the notification, it was plausable, and if I couldn’t see it because it was during the downtime, I could hear it because I have a handheld radio capable of picking up the ISS Amateur Radio downlink frequency, and could hear part of the conversation being had with astronauts.

You did enter your latitude and longitude correctly, including the negative sign, if needed? I don’t think you did…

37.25, 121.5 puts you in China, not California. You probably missed the - at the front of 121.5 :wink:

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I don’t know what to say… thank you! :smiley:

At least that shouldn’t be too hard… just have it blink when passing or something. and single or double blinks for success and fail, I suppose.

Feel free to suggest improvements… I’ll only ignore you if I don’t like them :stuck_out_tongue:

It was on a different thread, apologies. But when youhave multiple treads for essentially the same problem, it gets confusing. :wink:

It’s here: ISS Tracker- Debug Now? - #3 by normandunbar

But, and I mean but, that was correct when you were using LA as your timezone. Using UTC means nothing requires to be adjusted.

Ah! That might explain why you (@monsterthews) get alerts when the ISS is near to Japan!

Cheers,
Norm.

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Well, I couldn’t do yet another blink sketch, could I? :wink:

I might do that, if I get any playtime. I’ve just had some bargain Oled displays, the small ones (1.3 inch OLED Display I2C SSH1106 Chip 128 x 64 Pixel I2C display module), from AZ Delivery in Germany, that need “playing” with. (A great company to deal with, weekly bargains where buying 3 of something costs the same as 1. Maybe not good for Australia?

Cheers,
Norm.

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What’s wrong with good ol’ blinky… it’s quite an achievement compiling and uploading code to make it blink… After playing with the SDK for a whole new chip that is likely to replace the ESP8266 next year, and having to play with the lower level C stuff to get it to do anything, I should know! :laughing:

Worth a look… perhaps not so good for my bank account… that’s three times as many reasons to get something that looks tempting! :laughing:

That’s a SH1106 based OLED, so you might be able to switch to this library (untested by me), do a few minor tweaks, and it just work. If it’s that easy, you can then take advantage of the basically double vertical space to have more stuff on the display.

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Hmmm, interesting. I’ve just corrected my own lat/long and tested again. I’m in the middle of a 6 minute overhead pass right now, but looking at the ISS Live app on my phone, the station is overhead Algeria and is not quite able to be seen from the UK.

There is weirdness here methinks! :frowning_face:

Cheers,
Norm.

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Bummer! That particular library is for Arduino only, not for the ESP8266. Shame. It won’t compile for ESP8266. Never mind, there’s always U8G2 by Oliver. I’ll try that one out.

Cheers,
Norm.

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I am using the UTC time, unmodified.
Longitude was positive. i made it negative.

Now the timer says 15 minutes, but the station is over the middle of the Pacific, according to NASA’s real-time website.

I had a similar problem today. The alert said overhead but on checking, it was over Algeria. My “horizon of visiibility” apparently extends almost to Barcelona – according to the ISS Live app for Android – but Algeria is a fair bit further South.

I’ll be having a look when I have time. I know that UTC time is spot on, because I checked. I know my Lat/Long are correct as I’ve done lookups and got my actual Street name in response – so, I’m thinking that maybe the ISS API is not returning correct data, or there are gremlins afoot!

Cheers,
Norm.

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Implausible. It’s over the middle of Africa, timer says 1 hour.

It got that one right, but it says there’s another flyover in 1:30.

That’s implausible.

secrets.h- PIO didn’t save a copy in lib deps. It isn’t loading ssid or password from secrets.h.

When I took my logon credentials out of the .cpp file and put them in secrets.h, I lost WiFi.

I created a file and a folder in lib deps, but it didn’t work.

Why should it? It’s not a library. Only cached library files go in .pio/lib_deps.

If you’re not editing include/secrets.h (which is where it has always been), you’re editing the wrong file. :stuck_out_tongue:

How are you losing it? Via pulling from git? If so, you need to instruct git that you want to preserve your local copy of the file after you’ve filled it in.

Really? And where do you think it would be in roughly 1.5 hours (aka 1h30mins), given where it was 1.5 hours earlier? The ISS does pass over head multiple times in succession. It just won’t be directly overhead… i.e likely to be to the south the first pass, nearer to directly overhead the second, and to the north the third time (if you’re lucky to within 10 degrees of a third pass), or something like that.

image

Indeed… and to be honest it’s probably the better way to go… more universal display support for starters. Adafruit GFX is just for convenience since there was already Adafruit libraries in use… I would probably have used FastLED for the WS2812s if I had been writing this from scratch, and U8G2 for the OLED.

Maybe V2 will be a complete re-write… at the moment it’s looking like the only similarity to the original code will be the ISS notify lookup, and that may also go if it’s inaccurate or I find a more authoritative API source like something from NASA or ESA.

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Ummm, from https://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/webcasts/shuttle/sts111/iss-qa.html:

Joey from Australia
During a 24 hour period, how many times does the ISS orbit the Earth?
Well, the space station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes, so that means in a 24 hour day, the space station orbits approximately 16 times.

So, unless you think that “1:30” is one minute 30 seconds, then it is plausible. (The code only displays hours and minutes.)

Cheers,
Norm.

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Oh no, you didn’t… not the fifth grader answer! :laughing:

It actually calculates, and says: That's 04 hours, 48 minutes and 39 seconds from now… so it’s basically impossible to misunderstand that one :wink:

I now have it shoving the unixtime into TimeLib, so I can manipulate time-zones easily… giving this…

image

I pulled out the datetime that the Open-Notify ISS API reports when doing a query, and do you notice someing odd there… even though the current UTC time is 09:47 10:03, the API time is still back at 09:12… it seems if I change the number of entries to pull it will basically report the current time, but it looks like the API caches queries… it will be interesting to see how long for… maybe that adds a bit of error itself since it may not be tracking changes to the orbit as well as could be done.

Now, if you look at the NASA sighting opportunities page… this corresponds quite nicely with the highlighted listing if you take into account that

  1. Maryborough is just the nearest listing to me (so different lat/long - about 100km away)
  2. that the NASA times must be local time - they have just completely failed to mention the timezone their times are listed in thus confusing you if you think they’re in UTC or something! :man_facepalming: :laughing:
  3. that it is probably visible over my horizon one pass before it’s visible in Marybourgh, hence why I may see it at 00:36 my time, but it’ll be visible in Marybourgh on the next pass, just under 1.5 hours later…

Juicy stuff, eh?

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