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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

#61

Post by t0mas88 »

newsclues wrote: post #41

If you add a laser pointer, you effectively built a low cost anti aircraft weapon. Very cool

If you add a laser pointer you'll effectively get yourself arrested within a few hours.

Aircraft get laserd relatively often and it's dangerous to the pilots. We report it to air traffic control with an estimated location, they then coordinate with the police.

Common practice is to turn off exterior lights when lasered, because it's just bored people with a laser pointer and they can't aim when the plane has no lights on. But if you link it to ADS-B that would require switching off the transponder which will cause issues for ATC.

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

#63

Post by robotastic »

b33j0r wrote: post #56
b33j0r wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact idea and have been working on it. Have almost exactly your bill of materials. Glad to know there are others out there who find this interesting, great work! I was always worried about making it a public data source. Kinda seems like it could be potentially dangerous, but that’s completely paranoid speculation. Thanks for sharing!

I should clarify that I’m mostly guessing on your bill of materials. There are only a few obvious choices for this project.

I posted a bit more on what I am using on the About page: http://skybot.cam/about

I got all the camera gear on ebay, which was lucky.

I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't anything too crazy about making it public. I am also still trying to figure out if it is actually useful for anything... besides getting unlimited plane photos!

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

#65

Post by mike_d »

FearlessNebula wrote: post #57
robotastic wrote: post #19

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.

FYI if you were able to set this up, it would be trivial for you to share your ADS-B feed with Flightradar24[1]. This would give you a free business plan[2] for as long as you share, which would get you access to that data. [1] https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own [2] https://www.flightradar24.com/premium

Instead you should just feed ADSBExchange, which doesn't require premium business plans or other nonsense. They also do not censor the data and will show you planes that the owners don't want you to see.

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

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

#66

Post by sklargh »

robotastic wrote: post #34
csours wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome! I live north of Austin-Bergstrom and I quite often see planes on final approach. I've thought about doing this, and also trying to find a physical site for a telescope or telescopes to watch take-offs and landings.

Let me know if you ever go down this rabbit-hole. Happy to give you pointers! You can get some pretty decent cameras off ebay for <$500. Since you are close you do not need much zoom.

I live under KTEB’s most common departure procedure and very much want to integrate this with my current ADS-B exchange setup. Super excited to give this a shot, hopefully won’t freak out the neighbors too much.

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

#67

Post by fooker »

RobotCaleb wrote: post #14

About 5 years ago I started trying to build this exact thing. I wrote some code, printed some gears and attached them to servos, assembled some hall effect sensors onto the whole thing, and then stopped. I had a camera that I could command to an azimuth and an elevation. I think it was a PlayStation3 pseye camera. It certainly would not have been able to zoom in to the point that this one seems to be able to. I was g…

>printed some gears.

Would it be easier to get an astronomy mount and control it programmatically?

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

#68

Post by avree »

Graffur wrote: post #54
gnabgib wrote: 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...

Unfortunately no HTTPS on the website

Why would a website who's only purpose is delivering blurry pictures need HTTPS?

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

#69

Post by yeldarb »

phkahler wrote: post #24
yeldarb wrote: 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

Did they ever indicate using a model like that? Just plug in an ADS-B receiver and they'll broadcast their tail number and location to you. Everything else can be looked up.

Yeah the crop is done after uploading a photo taken towards the general direction of the plane:

> The Function uses a model trained in Azure Custom Vision to detect if there is an airplane in the photo and where it is

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

#70

Post by jhugo »

robotastic wrote: post #30
ytjohn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely incredible. I have been wanting to do this as well, but I was going to approach it from the computer vision approach (blueiris and deepstack ai). Or a dedicated camera and pythoncv. I never even thought of having cameras move to match flightaware data. A number of planes fly low and when I check flightaware, they're not on it. Or there's a plane that could be it, but it's flight path is heading Eas…

Doing a vision only approach would be really cool. A lot of the interesting planes do not have their ADS-B transponder on. The two systems could actually work well together. My system ends up generating a really nice, labeled dataset. I put some initial scripts / notebooks together for building ML models that can classify the different types of aircraft. https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model/script...

Since 2020-01-01, ADS-B is a requirement in a lot of US airspace (FAR 91.225). Turning it off is allowed for govt / intelligence / law enforcement / military only. Many countries have similar requirements.

People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service; this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.

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