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Comment by jheising | Hacker News Reader

Hi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you posting it here.

All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.

Thanks for checking it out!

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There is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.

I will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.

Probably your best bet -- EASA has worldwide cloudless imagery [1] (scroll down for a link to their tile server) as well as a worldwide high-resolution elevation model [2]

[1] https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/news/2024-2-27-exploring-new...

[2] https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/APIs/SentinelH...

I built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/

This is really nice. It's _almost_ useful for identifying features from where one stands, if it had another three levels of zoom and another three levels of voxel resolution.

I tried adding more resolutions, but had to balance it against cost of hosting. Each resolution is at least 2x the size of the combined all prev zoom level data. Currently I’ve 9 zoom levels total size 15gb, adding 1 more level takes it to 32gb but looks beautiful. With the current open data, I can generate upto 14 levels

Yeah, that's a pretty classic tradeoff. Thanks for hosting what you do!

Just in case you are interested, you can recreate this locally using the open source repo. The script downloads the open data and generate the voxels based on configuration. The max resolution is configured which you can increase. Just a few prompts and you can recreate high resolution upto 10m resolution in real world distance. :)

Thanks, I might do that. If so, I'll PR a config option. Thank you!

Europe LiDAR data: https://sonny.4lima.de/

It's somewhat old, but NASA has its SRTM height-map dataset. I wrote a project for reading this in Python many moons ago, in case it is of help to anyone:

https://github.com/adamcharnock/python-srtm

I originally used it for doing line-of-sight calculations for a wireless ISP I started.

This is very neat! Great job :)

I can empathize with your quota....was gifted a FlightWall recently (https://theflightwall.com) and it constantly throws a 'too many flights' indicator given that I live in a major metro with quite a bit of air traffic. I'm sure it was thrilling and terrifying to see your usage spike. Wishing you all the best of luck!

This is really interesting, I'm making something similar as a gift for my wife ( I didn't know this product existed). It's much smaller but shows a map of planes and their live location in the air space near our home.

I have to say though, it's very weird you're hitting API rate limits. airplanes.live is a free no-authentication needed API that lets you poll it 1 time per second, and with each poll it returns flight information for ALL flights in up to (I think) a 250nm radius.

I doubt this commercial product could use that API but my point is that this data isn't that valuable. Additionally for the size of the thing the could just put and adsb receiver in it....

Not OP but the API limits are for the earth imagery tiles which cost paid credits from Google. Not the flight info.

I think they were talking about the Flight Wall, which doesn't use Google Earth imagery, only flight data

FYI - airplanes.live is run by community hobbyists, who are paying out of pocket to keep the service running - so it's not free (it costs a lot of money to run), and commercial use does break their TOS. If you do use it in any capacity, at the very least please feed back into the network. It is very affordable to do (the SDRs can be had for cheap in various places) and easy to set up. Coverage is very important - the more feeders the better data everyone will have. (Not affiliated with them, just a hobbyist myself.)

https://airplanes.live/get-started/

Yes! I'm working on a feeder setup. But airplanes.live is actually moving away from the free model as of just a few days ago. They're asking for $25/month + a feed now.... Which seems like a lot, I'll still feed if they want it though.

Curious why isn't it using an ADSB receiver?

That is one hilariously overpriced product! Display: $15, Controller: $2, API: Free

Before you do that, check whether you'd be violating the ToS by caching tiles. I'm guessing, yes.

Did Google check if their scraping for AI training violated anyone's ToS?

Google was/is probably more ready to pay any associated fines or get banned from whatever services than OP is

Does this also generate atmospheric weather effects based on real-time weather data? Like if it's raining, would you see rain?

As a person currently experiencing some weather - no.

Somewhat. It currently simulates wind speed and direction for the movement of clouds. It also supports the ability to simulate cloud cover percentage (in the advanced options)— the reason it's not on by default is because we want users to get the best view of the sky no matter what the weather is like outside, so we default to 20%.

Other factors like rain could happen in the future.

Maybe provide an option for the user to bring their own API key for prettier results.

This is very cool, the ambient sounds are a nice touch.

Can you add the ability to search by satellite ID, or add a "Find the ISS" button?

Great idea!

Don't waste too much on it. I fear popularity is brief.

Ah, that's why the ground is just a grey-green surface.

the map displays some random things, sometimes wrong names of location, sometimes river, sometimes battles (??)

It's meant to be relatively random. The idea is to show you some well known cities and landmarks so that you can get an idea where you are, but then some random curiosities just for the sake of exploring and seeing new things.

If you can tell me where you saw the wrong names for locations I would love to look into it. Thanks!

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