Pokémon Go Scanner

The inspiration to make my own Pokémon Go scanner came from this great site FastPokeMap.se (and Twitter feed). Try this site first before venturing out to make your own scanner.

It’s a neat site, but unfortunately each scan is slow takes upwards of 20 seconds, and the failure rate is high. It’s strength comes from the caching of searches from various users so we can all know when found monsters are even outside that limited 70m radius. Here in Tokyo, it looks like there aren’t many people using this site.

Because I love making APIs, and with the boom that is Pokémon Go, I made a PHP scanner API that returns the GPS position of the monsters present within 70m of where an initial GPS. That API data is consumed by JavaScript to render little monsters on a map.

To help a few people, I made a private API based on the foundation of similar tools available on GitHub, but Niantic is on the heels of such tools, so to minimize an account from being ‘banned’ the scanner for a given account keeps the GPS restricted to that city (no teleporting, Hiro Nakamura!). This eliminates suspicious activity detection and prevents (so far) the difficult captcha that Niantic started using.

To further reduce suspicious activity, it would be nice to simulate walking that makes sense. I incorporated a grid-spiral walker that walks around to cover an expanding area. This way that 70m limit gets bigger, quick.

Here are a few scanners running at once using my own API, which is quick, and utilizing already existing JavaScript (courtesy FastPokeMap).

The results? Not bad at all. It’s not the most epic collection, but it’s an accomplishment in the programming sense. (P.S. There is a nest of Pikachu in Osaka. Spread the word.)

I’ve finished with this fun and don’t play Pokemon anymore. Have fun everyone!

Update

As of Sept. 14, 2016, FastPokeMap looks like it working great in Tokyo. Well done.