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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

#131

Post by cedivad »

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.

Hey I wanted to add myself to the list of people that always wanted to build this but never actually did. I wanted to build my own servo gimbal with an old telescope though, you choosing a 30x ptz makes it much more reasonable. Well done!

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

#132

Post by RealityVoid »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #124
ruforrel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times and maps out your exact house address?

Scrambling the time a random amount each flyover could help?

I don't think so. You only need 1 flight to locate him pretty accurately. If you do the thing you said, you'd need 2 flights along different axis to get a pretty good idea, with a larger amounts, you'd just improve accuracy a bit. Regardless, I think it doesn't matter. So what if they know where he lives, it's not like this sort of information is hard to come by anyway, and the risk profile of this is... not interesting, IMO.

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

#133

Post by phita »

robotastic wrote: post #39
chopsuei3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you upload data with PiAware or something similar, FlightAware gives you an Enterprise level account, not sure if that offers API benefits though - https://flightaware.com/commercial/premium/#subscriptions https://blog.flightaware.com/201802-free-benefits-with-your-...

oh yea! great point, I forgot about that. I am using PiAware to handle the decoding so I do have an Enterprise Account. I will have to check if I can make API calls for free.

Unfortunately FlightAware Enterprise doesn't get discounted API access.

The FlightAware API I was using (they have multiple) didn't provide all the data I wanted either. The ADSB Exchange Rapid API was more comprehensive, but came at a cost.

The aircraft don't broadcast everything over ADSB - so these sites are all pulling from a database somewhere else. It appears ADSB Exchange and some of the pi based UIs use the tar1090-db. This was easy to work with and free - just need to update it periodically due to registration changes.

https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db

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

#134

Post by phire »

Lammy wrote: post #111
jhugo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to if they are flying with ADS-B transmitting. They're broadcasting their position and will usually appear on FR24 etc. If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system so no filtering needed.

Phantom planes are also technically possible. One could even do it themselves using the "Havok" firmware for HackRF One. I won't link to it, but to quote its wiki, "Yes, it works. For real. If you want to try it out, DO NOT transmit on restricted bands and ESPECIALLY NOT on 1090MHz."

Yes, 1090MHz is probably the stupidest bad to illegally transmit on.

Not just because of the potential safety issue, but because of how easy it is to track you.

In many areas, they have Wide Area Multilateration equipment installed that will show the real location of the transmitter, instead of the fake GPS coordinates you transmit. Normally it's there to double-check the ADS-B coordinates are correct, to track older planes without ADS-B, and to give true altitude readings, but it will track illegal transmitters as a side effect.

Even in areas where they haven't installed a permanent MLAT system, they usually have some sort of equipment that can track down a 1090MHz transponder. For-example, search and rescue planes often carry one.

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

#135

Post by capableweb »

prox wrote: post #130
devoutsalsa wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in grandpa voice Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

In some places they even listed your job!

In some countries, this is still true, with the addition of even your salary being public information.

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

#136

Post by nojs »

jhugo wrote: post #73
zyang wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you filtering out military planes?

There's no reason to if they are flying with ADS-B transmitting. They're broadcasting their position and will usually appear on FR24 etc. If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system so no filtering needed.

Alternatively, you could use computer vision and only record the ones not transmitting - that would be an interesting data set!

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

#137

Post by punnerud »

ytjohn wrote: post #26
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.

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…

You could use the ADS-B data for training your vision solution

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

#138

Post by punnerud »

Useful idea for usage: Point a WiFi-dish/antenna towards the plane and gather WiFi & Bluetooth MAC addresses for all the passengers. Now you can make statistics about the number of passengers, how long /often they travel ++ good information if you want to trade stocks in airplane companies.

You can direct the antenna precisely because you have the image recognition in addition to GPS.

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

#139

Post by mormegil »

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.

For aircraft registration data, I think offline database download should be available without (paid) API access on some smaller services. I thought ADSBX was providing the aircraft database but cannot find it right now. Quick googling found opensky-network, but not sure how much is the database maintained. (Monthly snapshot keep being published, though.)
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