Geeks chip in to fund nerd's space station gizmo launch A self-described rocket nerd will be able to turn his International Space Station 'detector' gizmo into a product after fellow geeks chipped in thousands of dollars of investment. Nathan Bergey wired up a microcontroller to a set of lights so that they illuminate when the orbiting space lab passes overhead. Rather than …
Slow news day? From what I can tell, the device itself doesn't figure out where you are either. In effect he's built a light that will turn on and off based on timings that a PC gives it in batch, scraped from the Heavens Above website. A 3 hour job, max, on an idea that's already been done.
Not an "ISS Detector", or even an "ISS Predictor", more a "Light that switches on depending on a third party website". I wonder if Heavens Above are happy for him to make a retail product based on a resource heavy screen-scraping of their website? The fact they don't expose their data via API (hence his need to write a python script to scrape) should be enough of a clue that they don't want it done.
A quaint idea, but certainly no more impressive than any random Arduino projects that people do as hobbies on a regular basis.
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