jakopicevca2017 1.1.post0

Program for Astro Pi 2017/18 - Mission Space Lab - Team Jakopičevca

Program for Astro Pi 2017/18 - Mission Space Lab - Team Jakopičevca

Description

We would like to research how much of Slovenia (and other countries) is covered with forests. We would compare the results with previous pictures of forestation in order to determine possible deforestation or even expansion of the forests. We would also like to research light pollution with photographing at night. We would use NoIR camera in order to determine different colorization in pictures. The photographs would be analysed later.

How It Works

The program will use Python ephem module to determine location of ISS. If ISS is flying over certain countries, the program will take pictures for a certain number of seconds and save photos in a folder with a location name. Name of the photo is time of the photo. It’s possible that ISS doesn’t fly over certain countries, or if the location calculations with ephem are wrong, program will in any case take photos of Earth, but less often, and save the images in default folder. We will save direction of North from magnetometer due to a later analysis of photographs. Location, sensor data, and time will be saved in the CSV file.

The locations of the photographing and other settings are stored in the config.json file. This file also stores TLE data, so update them before running the program. In the locations section, the coordinates of countries for photographing are saved. The value latitude1 is the latitude of the most north point of the country, the latitude2 is the latitude of the most south point of the country, the longitude1 is the longitude of most west point of the country, and the longitude2 is the longitude of the most east point of the country. The value delay is the number of seconds between each photo of the country. In the default section, information about photographing when the ISS is not above any country are stored. The delay value is the number of seconds between each photo, and the fallbackDelay is the number of seconds between each photo when there is an error in obtaining an ISS location.

Usage

The program must be used on Raspberry Pi. The program is intended for use on ISS, but could be suitable for other environments with some adjustments.

Requirements

The program uses Python 3 and has not been tested on Python 2. It uses the following Python modules:

1. sense-hat

2. picamera

3. ephem

Installation

It is recommended to install program in Python VENV. Python VENV must be created with --system-site-packages argument. However, here are general installation instructions.

Installation from PyPI:

sudo pip3 install jakopicevca2017

Installation from GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/filips123/jakopicevca/ --branch 2017 --single-branch
cd jakopicevca
sudo python3 setup.py install

Running

Create config.json file with the following content (fill the missing informations):

{
  "TLE": [
    "ISS (ZARYA)",
    "### Get the latest ISS TLE data ###",
    "### http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/stations.txt ###"
  ],

  "locations": {
      "### Location Name ###": {
      "latitude1": most-north-point,
      "latitude2": most-south-point,
      "longitude1": most-west-point,
      "longitude2": most-east-point,
      "delay": photographing-delay
      }
  },

  "default": {
    "delay": default-photographing-delay,
    "fallbackDelay": fallback-photographing-delay
  }
}

Save the file and start the program with:

python3 -m jakopicevca2017 path/to/config.json path/to/file.csv path/to/image/folder path/to/file.log

CSV and log files, and image folder will be created automatically.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL License. See the LICENSE file for more details.