OrbitQuest

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  ISS Tracker outer view

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  ISS Path

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  Mobile view of the daily picture

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Inspiration

The theme this year is space travel. So why not create a project around those actually traveling through Space?

What it does

OrbitQuest tracks the ISS as it travels around the Earth, completing an orbit in around 90 minutes. You can also view NASA's Astronomy picture of the day.

How we built it

We used three.js for the 3-D graphics portion of the website. For real-time ISS positioning, the three.js script communicates with Django to grab position data. three.js is a powerful library that allows us to easily load the ISS model from NASA and texture a sphere to appear as the Earth. We also used various APIs for real-time ISS positioning and for a NASA picture of the day. The back-end was created in Django and is served over HTTPS with Nginx.

Challenges we ran into

One significant challenge we faced was maintaining a multi-user workflow using Git. There were more than a few instances in which our individual code conflicted with other team members. Implementing HTTPS was also complicated, but we figured it out after reading too much Nginx documentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the appearance of our ISS tracker. We are very new to JavaScript and learned a lot very quickly. The 3D graphics also appear very well on the website and it is compatible with a mobile viewport.

What we learned

• We learned to visualize three-dimensional objects on the client side in real-time.
• We significantly improved our knowledge and application of CSS and HTML.
• We also learned how to work together efficiently using Git.
• Learned how to implement HTTP/TLS.

What's next for OrbitQuest

In the future, we want to implement real-time moon and sun tracking. We also want to add user functionality where you can log in and set your address to receive notifications when the ISS is visible from your location. Additionally, we want to integrate hardware such as the esp32s3 module. Ideally, we would utilize RFID scanners with NFC Tags to send and pull data from the website. This is done with serial communication between an Arduino Uno and the esp32s3. Currently, the only part missing from this next step is the refinement of code, circuitry, and API requests

Built With

• css
• debian
• digitalocean
• django
• git
• github
• html
• https
• javascript
• nginx
• opengl
• python
• three.js
• tls