Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
jheising | on: Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead
Hi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you posting it here.

All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.

Thanks for checking it out!

gavinsyancey | parent | next
There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.
codetiger | root | parent | next
I built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/
jheising | root | parent | next
I will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.
adamcharnock | root | parent | next
It's somewhat old, but NASA has its SRTM height-map dataset. I wrote a project for reading this in Python many moons ago, in case it is of help to anyone:

https://github.com/adamcharnock/python-srtm

I originally used it for doing line-of-sight calculations for a wireless ISP I started.

stevage | parent | next
Before you do that, check whether you'd be violating the ToS by caching tiles. I'm guessing, yes.
awad | parent | next
This is very neat! Great job :)

I can empathize with your quota....was gifted a FlightWall recently (https://theflightwall.com) and it constantly throws a 'too many flights' indicator given that I live in a major metro with quite a bit of air traffic. I'm sure it was thrilling and terrifying to see your usage spike. Wishing you all the best of luck!

turbocon | root | parent
This is really interesting, I'm making something similar as a gift for my wife ( I didn't know this product existed). It's much smaller but shows a map of planes and their live location in the air space near our home.

I have to say though, it's very weird you're hitting API rate limits. airplanes.live is a free no-authentication needed API that lets you poll it 1 time per second, and with each poll it returns flight information for ALL flights in up to (I think) a 250nm radius.

I doubt this commercial product could use that API but my point is that this data isn't that valuable. Additionally for the size of the thing the could just put and adsb receiver in it....

icameron | root | parent
Not OP but the API limits are for the earth imagery tiles which cost paid credits from Google. Not the flight info.
Arn_Thor | root | parent
I think they were talking about the Flight Wall, which doesn't use Google Earth imagery, only flight data
johschmitz | parent | next
Maybe provide an option for the user to bring their own API key for prettier results.
d3Xt3r | parent | next
Does this also generate atmospheric weather effects based on real-time weather data? Like if it's raining, would you see rain?
tgv | parent | next
Don't waste too much on it. I fear popularity is brief.
Animats | parent
Ah, that's why the ground is just a grey-green surface.