Raspberry Pi and flight tracking

[dgates80]

Built a fun little hack over the last few days. Bought a Raspberry Pi micro computer .. $35 and a SDR - software defined radio- for $18, both from Amazon, and put together a ADSB transponder flight tracker. It feeds flight track data to Flightaware.com. The RPi runs Linux off of a microSD flash memory card, the flight tracker software is free from the Internet. It is running good!

See http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build for how I did it.... It was pretty easy!

 

[dgates80]

Oh, and if you want to learn Linux, the RPi runs Xwindows just fine. Has an HDMI port and plugs into your router, or you can get a cheap WIFI dongle and hook it to the 'net that way. I run mine "headless" and connect using PUTTY to get a terminal window, since I really don't need a fancy GUI, but that's just me.

 

[GURPS]

Awesome !!!



I have been wanting to get one of these .....

 

[jrt_ms1995]

Did you get a model B or the new model B+? Just curous. I play around with two 256 Mb and one 512 Mb model Bs.

 

[LibertyBeacon]

Built a fun little hack over the last few days. Bought a Raspberry Pi micro computer .. $35 and a SDR - software defined radio- for $18, both from Amazon, and put together a ADSB transponder flight tracker. It feeds flight track data to Flightaware.com. The RPi runs Linux off of a microSD flash memory card, the flight tracker software is free from the Internet. It is running good!

See http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build for how I did it.... It was pretty easy!

Good stuff.

I was a plane spotter back in the day (still am, but not as active as I used to be as I don't live in the flight path of IAD any longer), and got into ACARS pretty early on. We (I and some friends) were using small circuits integrated into a small project box which had a 1/4" audio jack which plugged into the audio out of an AM receiver tuned to a frequency of 131.550 MHz on one end. The other end was 9 pin RS-232 and that went the the serial port of an IBM-compatible PC. These were pretty early days of the internet and our builds were based on plans you could get off of ftp sites and some local mods I and some friends worked on.

Then we had some C code which would open up the serial port and read the bits coming from the ACARS transmissions. FoxBase was the only database engine we had easy access to at that time, and we stuffed our messages into there, having publicly-available documentation on the ACARS format to design the schema. We had a bit of fun with that project. It was really only able to run on a stand-alone PC; we had it on a dedicated Texas Instruments laptop with a 66 MHz 486 cpu and not much memory.

Anyway, I have a couple of R. Pis doing media stuff around the house. I've been thinking of taking one (or getting another) and experimenting with an SDR to make a more modern ACARS decoding system. I could stuff the data into postgres and throw a web server in front of it and serve it all up for everyone to see what planes come within radio range of my location. Might be fun. I'm sure someone has done plenty of work on this already, haven't poked around yet for prior art.

 

[itsbob]

There's already an APP for that isn't there?

You point your phone at a plane and it tells you all the flight info, or look at your screen and it shows you the air picture around you. Basically the same read out a en route controller will get on his screen.

http://planefinder.net/about/ads-b-how-planefinder-works/

You can see the ADS-B antenna on cell towers around our area..

 

[MMDad]

I like http://www.flightradar24.com/

They have a mobile app also.

 

[LibertyBeacon]

There's already an APP for that isn't there?

You point your phone at a plane and it tells you all the flight info, or look at your screen and it shows you the air picture around you. Basically the same read out a en route controller will get on his screen.

http://planefinder.net/about/ads-b-how-planefinder-works/

You can see the ADS-B antenna on cell towers around our area..

I kind of thought the point was that if you run your own ground station, you can submit your data to FlightAware (or any of the sites that aggregate this data). You submit your data, they have more accurate data for their users, and in return they might let you get real-time (vs. delayed) screens as a thanks for your data submission. Not to mention the satisfaction in DIY.

 

[crushmymugshot1]

The PiAware installation process takes only a few minutes. If you don't have PlanePlotter, you can download it and then send FlightAware your installation's serial number and we'll buy you a license. FlightAware will also give users a free Enterprise Account ($90/month value) in return for installing PiAware.