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ViewSHED

ViewSHED is an open-source API for computing the visible area given a location and elevation. It was built to aid in the construction of mesh networks and for use by amateur radio. The API currently supports GeoJSON and an HTML interface.

Calculating viewshed is not particularly hard but wrangling together the data and learning an appropriate GIS tool can be challenging. ViewSHED has an easy to use web interface and uses accurate (90 meter) global elevation data making calculating viewshed easy.

DEMO

API

ViewShed

Calculates the the viewshed given a location and elevation.

curl http://viewshed.icyego.com/api/v1/viewshed/{format}?lng={longitude}&lat={latitude}&altitude={altitude}&radius={radius}

####Parameters:

Name Description
format The return type. Currently geojson and html are supported. If html is specified a map will be rendered, visualizing the viewshed
longitude longitude of location
latitude latitude of location
altitude altitude of location/tower in meters above ground level
radius radius of viewshed calculation in meters
abs_altitude if specified aka abs_altitude=1 altitude will be relative to sea level rather than ground level
####Examples:

###Elevation Returns the elevation of the ground at a given location.

curl http://viewshed.icyego.com/api/v1/elevation/{format}?lng={longitude}&lat={latitude}

####Parameters:

Name Description
format The return type. Currently geojson and html are supported. If html is specified a map will be rendered, visualizing the elevation
longitude longitude of location
latitude latitude of location
####Examples:

##Running Locally & Contributing Because of its dependence on GDAL and OpenCV ViewSHED can be a little tricky to get running locally for development. The steps below will work on Ubuntu 14.04 if your not using virtualenv:

  1. Run sudo apt-get install -y libopencv-* libtiff5 gdal-bin python-dev python-pip python-opencv python-numpy python-scipy python-gdal libleveldb-dev
  2. Run git clone https://github.com/thingless/viewshed.git
  3. Run cd viewshed
  4. Run sudo pip install -r ./requirements.txt
  5. Run ./server.py --tile_template 'http://viewshed.icyego.com/api/v1/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.tiff'

__NOTE __: the setup instructions above are only suitable for development as there are rate limits enforced. If you want to deploy your own ViewSHED sever consult the deployment section.

##Deploying First, try the publicly hosted version and ensure it does what you want. The elevation data is approx. 30G and takes a while to download. Assuming you still wish to deploy your own server:

  1. Install docker on the server you'll be running ViewSHED on.
  2. Download the data with wget by running wget http://somedamurl
  3. Clone the prebuilt docker container with all requirements preinstalled by running docker pull freethenation/viewshed:1.0.
  4. Start the container by running docker run -it -v {data_folder}:/var/lib/viewshed -p 127.0.0.1:8080:80 freethenation/viewshed:1.0 where the data_folder is the path where you extracted the data tar ball you downloaded in step 2.

##Data Source & Quality The calculations are currently based on SRTM Digital Elevation Database v4.1. Calculations are accurate worldwide to approx. 90m.