sondehub

Station icon updates and ingestion filtering

Station Icons

I haven't been feeling too well lately so not a huge update today but I did want to provide an update with a few things that have changed recently.

As you would have seen we ended up using the circles for the station icons. There's multiple reasons for this and we really valued your feedback. We tried a few concepts with the icon but the biggest problem we ran into is how it looked when scaled down, or on low resolution displays. Along with this, dis...

Station Icons Poll

We've been playing with various ideas around station icons and would love your opinion. (this is a non binding poll) Classic station icon, or simple circles. Let us know why in the comments.

Examples:  

2021-08-12 10:44:40 +0000 UTC View Post

New Patreon rewards! Station icons!

Along with the previous perks y'all already love from Patreon we are adding in supporter exclusive station icons for the $3, $10 and $30 tiers! While the colours aren't confirmed yet they'll look something like this.

I'll be sending out a message to all the supporters on the tier levels that have the station icon perk asking for your uploader callsign. This has to match exactly to what you hav...

History API improvements

Last weekend I was able to get a significant amount of working done improving the history endpoints. The APIs have been updated and you can see an improvement in the latest version of the SondeHub Python library, along with the sondehub.org/card endpoint. We can see in the screenshot the old sondehub client would take minutes to download all sonde data while the new client took all of 4 seconds. These improvements means that we are now only keeping a few months of data in ElasticSearch.

Video, WebSockets in the frontend, predictions and history update

It's only when I look back at the last post do I realise just how much stuff has changed in the SondeHub ecosystem!

SondeHub video

First up a little treat. Due to the Melbourne lockdown AWS Melbourne users group was live streamed rather than the typical in person event. This has the bonus that the talks were recorded and published, one of which was myself talking about SondeHub infrastructure. 

If you want to check that out head to this 2021-07-31 23:56:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Various updates

Howdy all,

Just wanted to provide an update as to whats been happening in SondeHub land. I've been travelling (and got caught up in a bit of a travel issue) so I haven't had a huge amount of time of time to dedicate to SondeHub.

First up, Luke has done an amazing job of converting our front end to leaflet. We've always wanted to get this done, and a huge thanks to Luke to putting in the work to make it happen. We had two reasons for using it, Google Maps costs are significant and ...

WebSockets

Last post I mentioned one of the improvements we've made is reducing the cost of the WebSockets feed. I want to spend sometime to explain what it is, what it's for, why it's important and our current implementation details.

In a traditional HTTP setup your client (eg browser) has to request data. This is called polling, as the client has ask, or poll, for new data. As you need to choose how often to poll, it usually means the client is several seconds out of date. It's also resource int...

Backend improvements

Recovery markers

SondeHub Tracker now has a way of marking radiosondes as recovered.  

This required a small amount of changes on the backend to accomodate the extra data, but is easily something our ElasticSearch cluster can handle. I look forward to being to provide further analytics on sonde recovery rates!

All the hard work for this was done by the lovely M...

More affordable backend

In the release retrospect I talked a bit about reducing cost. As it stands Patreon doesn't cover the cost to run SondeHub and I make up the difference from my own pocket, so there is incentive from me to ensure whatever is implemented is not just maintainable but also affordable. 

I've implemented the changes previously mentioned, which included removing AWS IoT actions from the ingestion pipeline, and batching up SQS messages. It's looking like these changes have saved rou...