Simple python examples for Starlink dish API
- gRPC protocol modules for the Starlink dish (in /spacex/api), compiled mid-February 2021
- Very simplistic python scripts to show the two main API calls
- requirements.txt that provides the minimum python libraries for the scripts
This project is meant simply as a starting point. There are two ways you might use it:
-
Just grab the spacex/api files and drop them into your own project (or into one like starlink-grpc-tools), instead of having to generate the gRPC protocol modules for python.
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Install the project as is (
pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt) and then try runningstatus.pyto see if you are able to get data from your dish. If so, you are ready to prototype fromdish_get_status.py.
I have a Starlink dish. I saw others had found it uses gRPC to report stats. I wanted to be able to get those stats to a RaspberryPi.
There's a tool called grpcurl which would have been great,
but I couldn't find a binary for the Pi's ARM architecture.
Compiling it on a RaspberryPi was a long path and I was hoping to find a solution that would be fairly quick
and easy for others to use.
I found starlink-grpc-tools had a collection of tools that looked like what I needed. I was hoping it would be able to be installed and just run. However, it requires you to generate the gRPC modules, which sent me back to lots of compiling on the RaspberryPi. That was fine, but I wondered whether I could make it easier for anyone else.
Once I had the starlink-grpc-tools running, I thought it would be interesting to try to make the slimmest
version of that idea, which is now this respository.
I also bought a Pimoroni Unicorn HAT Mini and wrote a little python script to have the Unicorn HAT show me a graph of recent usage. Not quite ready for prime time, but it's fun. That was the real reason I went down this path.
- I don't know python at all.
- I'm not sure why the gRPC protocol modules aren't published, so if I find out I'm infringing on something I will remove this repo.
- I expect at some point the gRPC protocol modules will be out of date due to software changes from Starlink.
Hat tip to the work on starlink-grpc-tools. Everything I have that is working was basically learned from reviewing that repo.
I like the work on ChuckTSI/BetterThanNothingWebInterface. I thought I was going that direction (since I know PHP well), but getting it onto a RaspberryPi led to a dead end of not being able to generate the Starlink API protocol modules for PHP. If anyone has a solution for that, I would gladly make a PHP equivalent of this repository.