Christopher Stevens
Published © MIT

Track a Space Station by Voice Command

Where is ISS right now? The ISS Tracker Alexa skill will calculate its status as it orbits around the Earth at faster-than-a-bullet speed.

IntermediateProtip2 days1,258

Things used in this project

Story

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Schematics

ISS Tracker Schematic

Humans (or other vocal things) ask Alexa for the status of ISS. A response is calculated and returned by the alexaISS Lambda function after accessing stored TLE (two line element) data and nearby geographical features from the DynamoDB tables. Scheduled to run once per day, the alexaISSGetTLEs function retrieves and stores TLE data from the wheretheiss.at API. During setup of the skill, an GDAL-configured Ubuntu EC2 instance is launched and generates the geographic feature table later referenced by the skill (only run once during setup). All functions and tables run within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, with access policies configured using AWS IAM policies.

Code

ISS Tracker Alexa Skill

The ISS Tracker repository includes two lambda functions utilized by the ISS Tracker skill, sample utterances, intent schema and even source graphics for the skill icon. It's all here.

Credits

Christopher Stevens

Christopher Stevens

0 projects • 2 followers
I'm a web developer and designer who loves renovating and empowering over-sized web projects.
Thanks to Natural Earth and Bill Shupp.

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