A few months years ago, [Liam] funded a Kickstarter for a little desk toy that would tell him when the worldwide area station was overhead. [Liam] got a little exhausted of waiting, so he chose to develop his own with a Raspberry Pi as well as an astronomical computation Python library.

The outstanding part of this develop is computing where an orbiting item is in the sky provided the ISS’ orbital elements. For this, [Liam] is using PiEphem, a library that can compute the positions of the sun, moon, planets, asteroids, as well as Earth-orbiting satellites provided a place as well as a time. because the ISS orbital elements modification every so often, his software application is set up to download an update every week or so.

[Liam] developed a few versions of his area station detector, each with a different display. The simplest uses a few LEDs, either with a LedBorg, Blinkstick, or PiGlow to serve as a notification of when the ISS is overhead. two much more challenging versions utilize an LCD screen or LED matrix to signal when the next ISS pass will occur.

Video demo below.