Hack a day posted about this great project from Simon Aubury. Check out more on his blog here.
The Pi Plane Project tracks planes the fly over my house; records a short video – and uploads the clips onto the web.
You can see the latest overhead fly-overs here; and the closest aerial visits here
This is a result of a lot of tinkering; and a curious need of mine to combine my love of electronics, programming and aviation.
Commercial aircraft in Australia (and a lot of the world) periodically transmit their location and the altitude. Aircraft with ADS-B determine their position using GPS; and broadcast that position along with identity string, altitude (plus other useful information such as speed).
Using some inexpensive components, we can build a receiver to listen to these ADS-B signals to track these aircraft as they fly overhead. Using a bit of spunky maths, a bit of electro-mechanical tinkering and a few elastic bands I built a system to determine where in the sky these planes are; point a camera to them and track their movement whilst recording a short video of the flyby.
The videos are pushed onto a website; along with basic information such as aircraft type and destination. This flight information is textually overlaid onto the video.
The videos and metdata are stored in a database; and a dynamic public web site allows the curious to see a short video of planes and magic carpets flying over my home
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