ISS Above [Updated]

In April 2016 I had the privilege of participating in an ARISS space chat (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station). This is a little-known program which connects students who are licensed amateur radio operators with the astronauts on the space station. It was a tremendous event, the first ever in Rhode Island, and I was extremely moved while watching children ranging in age from 6 to 14 speak live to Jeff Williams aboard the ISS.

Which brings me to my latest project. ISS Above is a Raspberry Pi based application which displays real-time telemetry and live video feed from the ISS. It is available as an all-in-one package for around $150, or you can download the software for $30 and install it on your own RaspPi. I happened to have a couple lying around, so that's exactly what I set out to do.

Naturally, things went off without a single hitch (yeah, right). In fact, it was rather easy. The only difficulty I faced was running the PiFiller script on my aging Mac Mini (2007, Mac OS X 10.5.8). Double clicking the script gave the same error every time, but this was solved by simply opening the script in the AppleScript Editor and running it manually. The script doesn't provide much feedback and it takes a while, so just led it go. After that, I popped the Micro SD card into my RaspPi, and it booted up like a charm. I configured my location, and that was that.

A note about the Raspberry Pi: Be CERTAIN that you're using a power adapter that can supply enough current! For the RaspPi 1 & 2, 1 Amp minimum, for the RaspPi 3, 2 Amp+ is recommended. Don't simply use whatever charger you have lying around from your old Motorola or Samsung phones, which are commonly rated at 350 to 500 mA. This is INSUFFICIENT. Your RaspPi will brown out and reboot unexpectedly.

[Update]

The Easy Way:

I discovered after the fact that there's a web admin interface (naturally). Point your browser to:

http://issabove_ip_address/login

The default username is "admin", default password "nasa". You can configure much stuff here.

The Hard Way:

When one of my science teacher colleague expressed an interested (envy) in my RaspPi/ISS Above, I offered to set one up for him. It proved a bit more difficult this time, since my image is now over six months old. Apparently, Google has changed its Maps API which now requires an application key. This breaks the version that I have, and doesn't allow location to be configured via the web interface. Time to breakout the ssh client.

The RaspPi default username is pi, and the password is raspberry. I rarely change these, since most of my RaspPi applications are inside a firewall and I'm not terribly concerned about hackers (except myself) from within my LAN. If any of my students are reading this, they have already sworn to abide by the "white hat" hackers credo. (We'll see how that holds up.)

So in order to configure my location, I had to ssh into the box and edit a config file in the issabove directory

$ vi issabove/issabove.conf

Look for the following lines, and make the appropriate changes:

[Location]
city = No Longer Used
lat = 34.1478
lon = -118.1445
timezone = America/Los_Angeles
elevation = 263

For whatever reason, I also had to adjust the system timezone using raspi-config. Perform a restart, and that should do it.

$ sudo shutdown -r now