Pokemon Go Map at Washington University in St. Louis


Since the Pokemon Go craze started, I was excited to realize there were three PokeStops which I could reach without having to leave our building, with one being the Mars Rover Replica in the middle of our building. One day while Googling about Pokemon Go, I found an online travel company, Skiplagged,  that put up a really cool, real time Pokemon monitor, which anyone can contribute to by running a scanning process over a specific geographical area. They had a rather involved method written up to run it using Python on a Windows PC, but with a Linux system pre-installed with Python, running it was pretty trivial. They even have a threaded version now that runs extremely fast, so I have it scanning all sorts of areas in the St. Louis area (specifically Richmond Heights/Brentwood, WashU to the Loop, the Central West End, and SLU.) With just my one Linux server scanning those four areas with their Python script, it has made St. Louis show up as a bright, purple Pokemon hot spot on their national map!


There sure are a lot of Pokemon around St. Louis (especially a lot of Ratattas, Weedles and Pidgeys.) Hey, there is a Ratatta in our building right now! I also noticed I am not the only one scanning the St. Louis area, with other folks scanning in Soulard, South, West and North County and also some folks out in St. Charles County. We are all combining together to cover the St. Louis area so people can always find active Pokemon. Skiplagged also released an Android App which works as both a scanner and a real time locator. It cannot as easily be used to just scan non-stop like the Python script, but it does a quick scan in your area to look for nearby Pokemon. That is definitely a pretty cool app!


Location: Hadley Township, MO, USA

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