This is just a very short post for the Naas-Sallins Coder Dojo about a smaltalk clone of Scratch called Phratch. As the website says “ It includes two interesting categories: Files and colors. Files allows one to manipulate local and remote files, and Colors to manipulate color features”. So in this quick post we are going to have a look at the files extension.

The first item here is the one we are going to use by pointing the url at the open-notify api from our previous posts. Our very short 8 line program is as follows

Inside a standard ‘When Green Flag is clicked-Forever loop’

we set the variable mydata to the contents of our api call

we set the variables lat and lon to a particular range of characters in my data. I did this by trial and error and its a bit rough and ready.

we then set x and y to the lat and lon adjusted to match the dimensions of the display window size (360×480) to standard latitude and longitude (180×360)

finally we sleep for a minute

The sprite to represent the ISS position is a simple blue dot with the stage background set to a map of the world. The map projection I used was from a python basemap example with a quick photoshop adjustment to crop it to size. The Equidistant Cylindrical Projection matches the requirements of our display window and our result turns out to be pretty decent

So as you can see the ability that phratch has to interact with a file or a url opens up a whole new set of interesting opportunities.

If you are interested you can download phratch here.