ISS Spotter (NASA Spot the Station) 🚀

Share your Projects! Custom Integrations
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Hi Home Assistant Community,

I’m thrilled to share my new custom integration: ISS Spotter! It enables you to track upcoming International Space Station (ISS) sightings directly in Home Assistant. The integration fetches data from NASA’s Spot The Station website and the Open Notify API, providing accurate sighting times, astronaut details, and more as attributes of a single sensor.

This project began as a pyscript automation, which has been running reliably for over six months. Since I wanted to learn how to create a Home Assistant integration, this seemed like the perfect starting point—and maybe it’ll be helpful for others, too!

Since the integration scrapes a website, it can stop working at any time. But the website looks like it hasn’t changed since the 90s :yum: :joy: so i thought i give it a go.

Key Features:

  • Upcoming Sightings: Displays the next ISS sighting time as a sensor entity.
  • Rich Attributes: Includes duration, max elevation, appearance, and disappearance information.
  • Astronaut Info: Tracks the number of astronauts aboard the ISS (not people in space!) and lists their names.
  • Graceful Error Handling: Avoids switching to unavailable during temporary API downtimes by caching data.
  • UI Integration: Works great with Lovelace cards (e.g., Markdown or custom button cards).
  • Notifications Included: Provides pyscript and YAML scripts for automated notifications of upcoming sightings.

Installation

The integration is installable via a HACS custom repository (or manually). Full setup instructions are in the README.
Open a repository inside the Home Assistant Community Store.

Hope you enjoy it!
Cheers
Harry

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