Finding your hotspot neighbors with python

Blockchain & API
1

I’m starting to share some of my API code in helium_block_scraper. First up is a way to see hotspots near you- including their distance in miles.

Grab the repo, or here are some basic steps if that’s above your comfort level:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tedder/helium_block_scraper/master/nearby.py
pip3 install requirements geopy
python3 nearby.py your-hotspot-name

For instance:

$ python3 nearby.py Mean Alabaster Piranha
normalized name: mean-alabaster-piranha
dist score name
11.4    18 Electric Pickle Marmot
11.8    25 Electric Banana Lynx
 8.5    12 Bent Corduroy Tortoise
 8.3    43 Clean Lava Sheep
29.2    25 Long Zinc Aardvark
24.9    25 Tall Raisin Hyena
 1.2    94 Icy Purple Porpoise
...
3 Likes
2

Great! Do you have a code snippet for determining if a nearby hotspot has directly exchanged a packet with your hotspot?

3

The easiest way to do this right now is by examining witness data via the API. The API call looks like this:

https://alamo.helium.foundation/api/witnesses/<gateway_address>

This will give you a list of Hotspots that have witnessed packets from the target hotspot (called gateway in the API), along with the RSSIs of those packets, the number of times they have been witnessed at a given RSSI, and a few other things.

For example:

https://alamo.helium.foundation/api/witnesses/1128ESjqHfRcHbE4VgBvMhyJeA4BMmE5dsVa6w5ViCPqsmEa2vvy

produces data like the following:

{"address":"112tZNnHJt61zCU5hkyJdsKxt8Qr5KtyGwGU1oVcFdsT7j96WNB4","first_time":1571451804618356476,"hist":{"-132":0,"-123":0,"-114":71,"-105":36,"-96":0,"-87":0,"-79":0,"-70":0,"-61":0,"-52":0,"28":0},"name":"Slow Flaxen Locust","recent_time":1573795857104187306}

4

I just pushed an update to the repo that does this. Here’s the sample output:

hotspot name         count  recent time
Clumsy Peanut Wasp       8  2019-11-20T02:03:26.858747
Powerful Daisy Rat       1  2019-11-18T22:26:18.660485

I had it locally but things were hardcoded to my address.

5

Thanks! (This note has to be 20 char…

6

Another user (Tracy on Slack) and I collaborated. He added activity.py to the repo and I expanded it. Here’s a sample of its output:

Screenshot from 2020-01-18 17-15-04
Screenshot from 2020-01-18 17-15-041494×730 179 KB

Additionally, nearby.py shows lat/lon of other hotspots, sorts your witness counts by time, and shows the best RSSI.

7

Very cool. Thanks for putting this together. Anything we’re missing in the API that would make this easier to build / extend?

8

Yeah, a couple:

  • A way to go from hotspot name to ID without needing to fetch all of them (I know there’s a search, but it’s pretty abstract)
  • a consistent time field in blocks for /activity; generally they have a suffix of block_time but the prefix varies.
  • pagination and/or datetime ranges in /activity; currently it appears activity gives somewhere under 24 hours. It’d be nice to be able to say “the last hour” or “since 1/1/2020”
1 Like
9

Awesome. Thanks. Marc and team are in the midst of an API rewrite. We’ll take these into consideration.

1 Like