International Space Station Notifications with Python, Redis-Queue and Twilio Copilot

With the new Star Wars trailer coming out, I’ve been really excited about space lately. This could be pretty obvious based on what I wore during my API demo at BostonHacks last weekend. Twilio also had private screenings of The Martian for community members recently in several different cities.

It’s not surprising that I think the International Space Station is awesome. Naturally I thought it would be cool to know when it is hovering over me. Once I found out about the ISS Open Notify API, I knew I had to build a notification system that allows subscribers to receive an SMS whenever the ISS flies over their area.

You can check out the app I built and look at the code if you want. Or I can show you step by step how to build this, and how you can scale it to send from a pool of Twilio numbers rather than just one using new Twilio Copilot features.

ISS Tracking Tools

We will build a web application for users to subscribe to notifications. To do this we’ll use Flask for our web server and the ISS Open Notify API to find out when the ISS is passing overhead for a given latitude and longitude.

Before you start coding, make sure you have Python installed as well as pip, which should come with most versions of Python. This will work in either Python 2.7 or Python 3 . You’ll also need to install Redis, which can be done using the following terminal commands: