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46 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
46 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
# (S)pothole
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**Work in progress.**
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(S)pothole is a utility to aggregate "spots" from amateur radio DX clusters and xOTA spotting sites, and provide an open JSON API as well as a website to browse the data.
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While there are several other web-based interfaces to DX clusters, and sites that aggregate spots from various outfoor activity programmes for amateur radio, (S)pothole differentiates itself by supporting a large number of data sources, and by being "API first" rather than just providing a web front-end. This allows other software to be built on top of it.
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The API is deliberately well-defined with an OpenAPI specification and auto-generated API documentation. The API delivers spots in a consistent format regardless of the data source, freeing developers from needing to know how each individual data source presents its data.
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(S)pothole itself is also open source, Public Domain licenced code that anyone can take and modify.
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Supported data sources include DX Clusters, the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), the APRS Internet Service (APRS-IS), POTA, SOTA, WWFF, GMA, WWBOTA, HEMA, and Parks 'n' Peaks.
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### Accessing the public version
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TODO
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### Running your own copy
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TODO
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The software can take a few seconds to start up, mostly because it is downloading an updated file to match callsigns to countries. This is normal, don't panic!
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### Writing your own Providers
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(S)pothole is designed to be easily extensible. If you want to write your own provider, simply add a module to the `providers` package containing your class. (Currently, in order to be loaded correctly, the module (file) name should be the same as the class name, but lower case.)
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Your class should extend "Provider"; if it operates by polling an HTTP Server on a timer, it can instead extend "HTTPProvider" where some of the work is done for you.
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The class will need to implement a constructor that takes in the `provider_config` and provides it to the superclass constructor, while also taking any other config parameters it needs.
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If you're extending the base `Provider` class, you will need to implement `start()` and `stop()` methods that start and stop a separate thread which handles the provider's processing needs. The thread should call `submit()` or `submit_batch()` when it has one or more spots to report.
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If you're extending the `HTTPProvider` class, you will need to provide a URI to query and an interval to the superclass constructor. You'll then need to implement the `http_response_to_spots()` method which is called when new data is retrieved. Your implementation should then call `submit()` or `submit_batch()` when it has one or more spots to report.
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When constructing spots, use the comments in the Spot class and the existing implementations as an example. All parameters are optional, but you will at least want to provide a `time` (which must be timezone-aware) and a `dx_call`.
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Finally, simply add the appropriate config to the `providers` section of `config.yml`, and your provider should be instantiated on startup.
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### Third Party Libraries
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The project contains a self-hosted copy of Font Awesome's free library, in the `/webasset/fa/` directory. This is subject to Font Awesome's licence and is not covered by the overall licence declared in the `LICENSE` file. This approach was taken in preference to using their hosted kits due to the popularity of this project exceeding the page view limit for their free hosted offering.
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The software uses a number of Python libraries as listed in `requirements.txt`, and a number of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and moment.js. This project would not have been possible without these libraries, so many thanks to their developers.
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