The purpose of this project is to improve my chances of seeing the Aurora Borealis/Northern Lights in the UK. This a Python3 Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that obtains electromagnetic readings and publishes them over MQTT. The goal of this is to ingest the data in home automation like Home Assistant, and build automation around this data. For example, if the electromagnetic reading is greater than 80/100 (high chance that the Aurora Borealis is visible to the naked eye) I want to be notified.
Note, this tool is powered through the folks over at Aurora Watch, big shoutout, thank you.
➜ virtualenv env
➜ source env/bin/activate
➜ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
➜ python3 cli.py --mqtt_topic <topic name>Note, this project depends on environment variables to avoid persisting credentials to disk. These environment variables include:
MQTT_BROKER_URLMQTT_BROKER_PORTMQTT_BROKER_USERNAMEMQTT_BROKER_PASSWORD
The message that is published over MQTT is a string JSON object that contains two key/value pairs. The first key is a value that contains the electromagnetic reading. The second is the last_updated key that contains the time the reading was updated.
{
"last_updated": <%Y-%m-%d %H:%M Timestamp>,
"value": <float reading out of 100>,
}Note, the reading is updated hourly because that's when Aurora Watch updates. To avoid having to awkwardly integrate sleep logic I run this script hourly using Cron. I offset the job by 3/4 minutes past the hour to give Aurora Watch some time to publish the latest reading.
See requirements.txt but also remember to setup a MQTT broker(such as mosquitto).