Introduction

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on developing a system to scan and map Pokémon GO spawns (among other things) for my local community. I don’t play enough to really take advantage of it myself, but hopefully others find it useful. My true goals here were twofold:

1. Gain experience developing computer programs, reverse engineering, and networking
2. If it works, potentially gain a small source of passive income to support myself while attending university

Background Research

When Pokémon GO was first released in 2016, it had an exposed API that allowed pretty much anyone with the required knowledge to build all sorts of maps and tools to assist players. This was fixed after not very long, and for quite some time it became something of a cat-and-mouse game between Niantic, the developers of the game, and the developers in the community trying to exploit it.

V5 Addrled

VEXos 1.1.2 introduced a new ability to control WS2812B addressable LED strips directly from the ADI on the V5. Previously this was semi-possible by bit-banging with APA102C strips, but the speed at which the V5 could send data to the lights was far too slow to be workable in any real application. User code, that being the code that runs on CPU1, is limited to updating the state of the ADI every 10ms. The protocols to drive lights require much faster timings than that to work properly, so until firmware was added to drive this directly from CPU0, controlling addressable lights wasn’t feasible.