“This Pico-based International Space Station (ISS) Tracker project will cost around 25 ($30) - most of which is the cost of the display I used. It can be adapted to use any Pico-compatible display you may have, or even to send the tracking information to another PC or Raspberry Pi.
In its current form, it will:
- Show the latitude and longitude of the sub-satellite point (the point on the earth directly below the ISS)
- Show the distance to a designated base station.
- Show the ISS position on a world map.
- Indicates when the satellite gets within 5000 km of the base station using the display’s on-board RGB LED using different colours as it gets closer.
Supplies
- Raspberry Pi Pico W (the WiFi version) with GPIO pins fitted
- A display compatible with the Pico. For this project I used the Pico Display Pack 2.0 which has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, 4 user definable buttons and a programmable RGB LED. It will fit directly onto the Pico GPIO pins and does not need a separate power supply.”