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I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

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Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#42
post #36

One neat thing that could be made with these individual pics is to composite them to this sort of neat picture https://i.imgur.com/6czv1gU.jpg

Oh! that is a great idea. I am already tracking the camera's azimuth and elevation so I could probably composite everything to togther.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#44

How much does it cost to run this on Azure?

Good question - I just checked and my forecast for the month is $65... but I have a few other things running. One of the perks of working at Microsoft is that you get $150 monthly credit, so I didn't work too hard to keep the costs low. I could save a little by combining the API and App server.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#45

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

This is such a cool hack, thank you for building and sharing this.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#47
post #20

Any interest in sharing the plane dataset you used to train Azure Custom Vision with others? Happy to host it on Roboflow Universe along with an API to a trained model others can hit to detect planes in images. We’ve got one detecting planes on the ground but not yet in the air! https://universe.roboflow.com/gdit/aerial-airport

Definitely - Let me build a little better dataset. I need to augment a bit because it was false detecting on some of the contrails.

I built some scripts to also start building a model that can classify the different aircraft models. One of the interesting things with this, is that you get really accurate labels... probably better than what a human could do for images of this size.

https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#48

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

since it got hugged to death by HN can you post some pics?

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#49
post #27
post #22

Feels like the website-about page: http://skybot.cam/about is a much better link than a tweet.. loaded with details. For example: - Most planes are passing at over 30,000' - It's using a Costar RISE 4260 camera /w built in heater - It leverages SkyScan by IQT labs[0] - It leverages Azure custom vision API[1] [0]: https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...

I wonder what the monthly Azure bill is. Also wondering what the stack would look like for a self-hosted version with equivalent or better functionality!

You could get away with a pretty cheap hosting bill, I think a $10 VPC would be more than enough. My current Azure forecast is around $65, but that is for a couple other things too. Half the reason I went big with the different features is that I just started at Microsoft and wanted to learn the different things... plus you get a $150 monthly credit.

All of the capture stuff just runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly over my house

#50

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions. To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

Your site got hugged to saturation but this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just got a sort-of ridiculous telescope (Celestron 11" SCT on alt/az mount, 2800mm focal length) and have been tinkering with ADSB for years. Can't wait to check out your work!
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