himawari_fetch

Put near-realtime picture of Earth into a directory

himawari_fetch is a Python 3 script based on himawaripy that fetches near-realtime (10 minutes delayed) picture of Earth as its taken by Himawari 8 (ひまわり8号) and saves them to a prespecified directory. It also cleans up images older than a day.

Set a cronjob (or systemd service) that runs in every 10 minutes to automatically get the near-realtime picture of Earth.

Configuration

usage: himawari_fetch [-h] [-d DEADLINE] [--output-dir OUTPUT_DIR]
                      [--override-date OVERRIDE_DATE]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d DEADLINE, --deadline DEADLINE
                        deadline in seconds for this script to finish, set 0 to cancel
  --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        directory to save images and metadata
  --override-date OVERRIDE_DATE
                        UTC timestamp in format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

While the script is fetching a new image, it will use around 700 MiB of memory.

You should set a deadline compatible with your cronjob (or timer) settings to assure that script will terminate in X minutes before it is started again.

Installation

Uh. Will have to figure this one out, since I don't want to push it to pypi.

For Mac OSX Users

OSX has deprecated crontab, and replaced it with launchd. To set up a launch agent, copy the provided sample plist file in osx/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist to ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and edit the following entries if required

mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
cp osx/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/

ProgrammingArguments needs to be the path to himawari_fetch installation. This should be /usr/local/bin/himawari_fetch by default, but himawari_fetch may be installed elsewhere.
StartInterval controls the interval between successive runs, set to 10 minutes (600 seconds) by default, edit as desired.

Finally, to launch it, enter this into the console:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/at.kescher.himawari_fetch.plist

Uninstallation

# Either remove the cronjob
crontab -e
    # Remove the line
    */10 * * * * himawari_fetch...

# OR if you used the systemd timer
systemctl disable --now himawari_fetch.timer
# If not packaged but manually created systemd units, also do
rm /etc/systemd/system/himawari_fetch.{timer,service}

# Uninstall the package
# haha, TODO!

<INSTALLATION_PATH> can be found using the command which -- himawari_fetch.

Attributions

Thanks to Bora M. Alper for the maintaining of himawaripy.

The next attributions are kept intact from the original repo:

Thanks to MichaelPote for the initial implementation using Powershell Script.

Thanks to Charlie Loyd for image processing logic (hi8-fetch.py).