I don’t have the know-how to develop something like this, or the time to learn, but I’m throwing this out there in case anyone else is looking for a new project to keep them busy. It could be fun to have a binding that tracks the International Space Station (and other satellites). IFTTT has a feature that tells you 60 minutes in advance of an upcoming pass, but that’s about all it does. A binding that calculates, based on your location and current orbital information, the current visibility and brightness of various satellites could be useful for stargazers! I’m picturing having a bulb that changes colour and brightness based on the visibility of various satellites, but the possibilities are endless!
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Cool idea. I know just more that squat about coding, but a cool idea nevertheless.
An idea like this could have many uses. A light that changes color regarding traffic to your work for example.
Man I hate you… I was looking forward to having a lazy little weekend and here you come, giving me ideas for new bindings 
Definetely something I have to think about after finishing the first five bindings I have planned 
Sites like n2yo.com offer live satellite tracking based on location, and others like it are used by amateur radio hobbyists to plan contacts (you can use transponders on some satellites to establish communication with other hams, the ISS occasionally transmits down images, etc…). n2yo.com does have an api (n2yo.com/api) but that part of the site appears to be under construction currently…I think this is a great idea, though!
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Ha! I do what I can!
Oh, I never even thought of using something like that! Using the http binding and the n2yo (or similar sites) API would be fairly easy, and save a lot of math. A proper binding would require less frequent updates, as you’d only need a daily updates of the satellite orbits, so there’s trade-offs either way, but the API should suit my needs perfectly. Thanks for that!
Just a reminder if and when someone would start to implement a binding for this… Some US agency (Seems to be NASA, but I need to read more about who owns and finances this site) seems to provice a nice API for TLE data. Which in turn would be very helpful for identifying orbits of satellites…
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Thanks for that!
I found this thread on calculating satellite passes in Python, using the pyephem library. I wonder if there’s any similar ephemeris libraries for xbase (or I understand Java libraries will work? I’m still a little unsure of the relation…). What language would bindings be written in, anyway? I haven’t even got that far yet.
Pure java. Binding programming is a bit more complicated, though, and also getting a binding accepted into the main source tree takes it time as our maintainers are overworked already.
But you can always set up your own source tree somewhere on github.
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Any progress on this topic?
My dream is to follow the satellites on my place on the map. Is that possible? 
Unfortunately, I this is way above my pay grade, and I’ve been too busy to learn. There are apps out there for tracking satellites, though it would definitely be nice to have the functionality in openhab.