spaceboard 1.1.8

This is a simple, open-source and self-hosted dashboard to visualize space data, particularly NEOs (Near Earth Objects) and datas related to them.

Why I built this stuff?

Good question. I built it for an Hack Club x NASA event called Stardance. The goal of this project is to provide a simple and easy access to datas about space objects that will get closer to our planet.

When I had to choose a project for the event, I asked myself a question: "What's a thing about space people can be interested in, but there aren't so much things about it?". Then I thought about 2024 YR4, a NEO which, at one point, had as much as 3% of chance to hit the Earth. I remebered that this news went so much viral at the time, in 2024. So I thinked: "Maybe something can show this objects data can be a cool stuff!". So I started to work on show this data in a simple way, and now, here we are.

How it works?

Well, it uses, as I mentioned before, the Python framework Textual to create a simple and interactive dashboard. It also uses the NASA API to get datas about NEOs with an httpx client request.

Features

When you run the dashboard, you can see a simple dashboard with a list of NEOs for the current day. You can navigate through the list with the arrow keys and change units system using the c key. The tab is well-spaced and easy to read. It uses a special system of layout for keep the scrool level costant and avoid the annoying "jumping" effect when you scroll through the list.

Installation

To use the software, first check to have Python 3.11+ installed on your device. If you don't have it, you can download it from the official Python website. Then, you can install the software using the following command (paste it in the terminal, in the directory you want to install the software):

pip install spaceboard

and then

spaceboard

At the first start, the software will give you the instructions to get your free NASA API key (don't share it with anyone!). If you want to have only a look, use "DEMO_KEY" as API key value (you'll get a really small nunber of requets per day, but it's ok to avoid the configuration of a really one). Follow them and you will finally enjoy spaceboard!

This is a preview of the dashboard in action:

Software structure

The main.py handles the interaction between onboard.py (that gets the currents 5-days window and the API key -after checking if it's present in the .env file-), and the tui_dashboard.py(that creates the dashboard and displays the datas). This one uses a function from client.py to get the datas from the API. Particularly, this request function has a sub-function to create a object for each NEO, using a different class for the two different metric sistems (imperial and metric). The tcss directory contains the Textual TCSS files to give the dashboard a better look. The .env file is autocreated at the first start of the software. The assets directory contains the logo and the gif preview of the README file.

AI usage

I used AI to learn some of the skills I used in this project. No code in this software is created by AI.

Credits

Credits go to the Hack Club and NASA for the event, to Will McGugan for Rich and the Textual amazing framework and to ProjectDiscovery for httpx. Also, thanks to all the people that will contribute to this project in the future.