aistweet, a Twitter photo bot for Raspberry Pi AIS tracking stations

aistweet tracks ships via AIS and takes their picture with a Raspberry Pi camera as they pass by.

Written for and powering the Detroit River Boat Tracker. Read about how it was made!

How To Build It

Things you will need:

• a Raspberry Pi
• a Raspberry Pi Camera Module
• a USB SDR dongle, such as Nooelec NESDR Smart v4
• a VHF antenna suitable for receiving AIS transmissions
• an Adafruit VEML7700 ambient light sensor module (optional)

Build and install rtl-ais, and configure it to stream UDP data to the host and port defined by the aistweet command line.

If you want to also upload your AIS data to other services online and have a locally-hosted interactive map, you can use AIS Dispatcher for Linux.

It is important to set the latitude, longitude, and direction of your camera accurately in order for the snapshot timing to work. The direction is measured in degrees clockwise from north of the camera's center axis.

Command Line

usage: aistweet.py [-h] [--host HOST] [--port PORT] [--db DB]
                   [--hashtags HASHTAGS [HASHTAGS ...]] [--tts]
                   latitude longitude

Raspberry Pi AIS tracker/camera Twitter bot

positional arguments:
  latitude              AIS station latitude
  longitude             AIS station longitude
  direction             bearing of camera (degrees clockwise from north)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --host HOST           host for receiving UDP AIS messages
  --port PORT           port for receiving UDP AIS messages
  --db DB               database file for static ship data
  --hashtags HASHTAGS [HASHTAGS ...]
                        hashtags to add to tweets
  --tts                 announce ship name via text-to-speech
  --light               disable night snapshots via light sensor

required environment variables:
  TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_KEY
  TWITTER_CONSUMER_API_KEY_SECRET
  TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN
  TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
  TWITTER_CLIENT_ID
  TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET
  TWITTER_CALLBACK_URI

How To Authenticate With Twitter

Follow the instructions on the tweeter-basic repository to:

• create a Twitter v2 API project
• generate the required keys to be set as environment variables
  • note: the callback URI is recommended to be http://localhost/callback
• generate the required token by doing a 1-time self-hosted browser authentication
  • note: the token is auto-refreshed with every tweet. However, if the token isn't refreshed in 6 months it will require user intervention to be re-generated.

Dependencies

• astral
• emoji-country-flag
• event-scheduler
• geopy
• mpg321
• picamera
• pyais
• pytz
• timezonefinder
• tweeter-basic
• adafruit-circuitpython-veml7700 (optional)
• gTTS (optional)