aistweet, a Bluesky photo bot for Raspberry Pi AIS tracking stations
aistweet tracks ships via AIS and takes their picture with a Raspberry Pi
camera as they pass by.
Written for and powering the Detroit River Boat Tracker. Read about
how it was made!
How To Build It
Things you will need:
- a Raspberry Pi
- a Raspberry Pi Camera Module
- a USB SDR dongle, such as Nooelec NESDR Smart v4
- a VHF antenna suitable for receiving AIS transmissions
- an Adafruit VEML7700 ambient light sensor module (optional)
Build and install rtl-ais, and configure it to stream UDP data to the host
and port defined by the aistweet command line.
If you want to also upload your AIS data to other services online and have a
locally-hosted interactive map, you can use AIS Dispatcher for Linux.
It is important to set the latitude, longitude, and direction of your camera
accurately in order for the snapshot timing to work. The direction is measured
in degrees clockwise from north of the camera's center axis.
Command Line
usage: aistweet.py [-h] [--host HOST] [--port PORT] [--db DB]
[--hashtags HASHTAGS [HASHTAGS ...]] [--tts]
latitude longitude
Raspberry Pi AIS tracker/camera Bluesky bot
positional arguments:
latitude AIS station latitude
longitude AIS station longitude
direction bearing of camera (degrees clockwise from north)
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--host HOST host for receiving UDP AIS messages
--port PORT port for receiving UDP AIS messages
--db DB database file for static ship data
--tts announce ship name via text-to-speech
--light disable night snapshots via light sensor
required environment variables:
BLUESKY_USERNAME
BLUESKY_PASSWORD
Dependencies
- astral
- atproto
- emoji-country-flag
- event-scheduler
- geopy
- mpg321
- picamera
- pyais
- pytz
- timezonefinder
- adafruit-circuitpython-veml7700 (optional)
- gTTS (optional)