Automatically Receiving, Decoding and Tweeting NOAA Weather Satellite Images with a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR

Over on Reddit we've seen an interesting post by "mrthenarwhal" who describes to us his NOAA weather satellite receiving system that automatically uploads decoded images to a Twitter account. The set up consists of a Raspberry Pi with RTL-SDR dongle, a 137 MHz tuned QFH antenna and some scripts.

The software is based on the set up from this excellent tutorial, which creates scripts and a crontab entry that automatically activates whenever a NOAA weather satellite passes overhead. Once running, the script activates the RTL-SDR and APT decoder which creates the weather satellite image. He then uses some of his owns scripts in Twython which automatically posts the images to a Twitter account. His Twython scripts as well as a readme file that shows how to use them can be found in his Google Drive.

mrthenarwhal AKA @BarronWeather's twitter feed with automatically uploaded NOAA weather satellite images.
mrthenarwhal AKA @BarronWeather's twitter feed with automatically uploaded NOAA weather satellite images.

5 comments

  1. Mickael Massonneau

    Bonjour, j’ai d’excellentes images NOAA et Meteor-M2 que je voulais partager sur mon comte Twitter mais je bloque avec twitter, il semblerai qu’il faille aller sur “twitter developper” et avoir un : “CONSUMER_KEY” et un “CONSULER_SECRET”….. Comment les obtenir ??!
    Help
    Mickaël

  2. John

    I followed the instructions on the instructables webpage but rtl_test is failing and thus also my captures.
    I receive the error
    cb transfer status: 1, canceling…
    Library error -5, exiting…

    Have no clue what to do next other than google around

  3. DE8MSH

    Hey.

    This is a great tutorial. Thank you for showing this! This is the reason why I love this page since years!

    And now: Let’s do it with automaticl decoded SSTV pictures sent from ISS. Or automaticly generated RTL_POWER heatmaps… Or or or…

    Thank you guys!

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