IssApi

Description

IssApi is a wrapper written in Elixir for Open Notify. It provides a way to tap in to some of NASA's data via an API interface. It currently supports two different endpoints:

• Current location of the ISS
• Number of people in space

As of now the wrapper only supports the current location of the ISS, but will add the second endpoint at some point.

Current Location of the ISS

The current location of the ISS is provided by the Open notify API in the following format:

{
  "message": "success", 
  "timestamp": UNIX_TIME_STAMP, 
  "iss_position": {
    "latitude": CURRENT_LATITUDE, 
    "longitude": CURRENT_LONGITUDE
  }
}

The UNIX_TIME_STAMP is of type integer and will be parsed directly by the wrapper. The CURRENT_LATITUDE and CURRENT_LONGITUDE are of type float, but are presented as strings in the API. The IssApi wrapper will parse these values to float directly so they can be directly used in the code without having to do anything extra.

An example of what that would look like:

iex> IssApi.location()
{:ok, %{position: {35.9648, -143.0953}, timestamp: 1699027915}}

As shown above, the function will return a tuple where the first element will be either :ok or :error and the second element will be the response. In case of :ok, the response will be a map with two keys. The first one is position, which will have a value that is a tuple. The first value of the tuple is the latitude and the second element is the longitude. The second key is the timestamp. When an :error is returned, it will always return a tuple where the second element is another tuple with the error code and the value that caused the error.

Installation

To use the library add the IssApi to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:iss_api, "~> 0.2.0"}
  ]
end