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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

#161

Post by AnssiH »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #119
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?

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!

Here in Finland the companies operating the phone books and directory services still exist, and you can still search people's phone numbers and addresses online or by calling/texting directory services - just no printed books anymore.

(and you can of course unlist yourself)

I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?

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

#162

Post by eggy »

robotastic wrote: post #106
eggy wrote: post #91

A thought experiment leapt to mind on how one would triangulate (septangulate!) your location based on heading, time, flight information, and their intersections. I suppose you could get within a 100 meters? Very cool photos! When I lived in Macau a while back, I used to listen to the Hong Kong Airport tower on my SDR and try to link it to flight data, but at the time (2011/2012 or so)my connection and the data was n…

Totally - I think you could work back where the camera is based. I have the bearing / azimuth of the camera for each photo, so you could look up where each plane was at that timestamp and then project backwards. I bet you had much better aircraft flying out of Hong Kong!!

I was only listening, but it was fun!

I listened to the plane landing that my older children were on when coming to visit me.

What amazes me about your project is to put focus on things we take for granted going over our heads all the time.

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

#163

Post by mod »

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…

I also have military planes flying over frequently. I live in the Ozarks, and they seem to enjoy flying quite low through the valleys.

I'm sure some people don't like the noise, but I love seeing the planes so close.

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

#164

Post by robotastic »

mackmgg wrote: post #109
robotastic wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be awesome! How fast can those mounts move? Would they be able to follow an aircraft? I have found that more zoom actually makes things a little tricker because you have to make sure it is leveled and aligned precisely. When my camera is fully zoomed, it has about 1 degree vertical field of view.

I've got a 6" Celestron, and I think it would be capable of following a plane that's sufficiently high up. It can slew a max of 5°/sec, so that would be ~500mph at 10000' or well over 1500mph at 30000'. Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no reason you couldn't align it to stars at nig…

That is interesting! There is this cool piece of software that looked like it helped with a lot of this. It did visual object tracking with telescopes... but it is no longer available: http://www.optictracker.com/What_is_it.html

Alignment has been a big pain for me. I might actually have to look at how to use stars to correctly position everything.

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

#165

Post by robotastic »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #114
robotastic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I managed to get it for $500 on ebay... but I just checked and it looks like similar ones are around $1000 now, so I guess I got lucky. An Axis PTZ dome camera turned upside down works great too though and there are a lot of those available on Ebay.

Do you know any similar cameras for even cheaper (i.e. cheap Chinese stuff)?

In theory it should work with any camera the supports ONVIF, which is a standard for security cameras... actually, as long as the camera has an API you could probably get it to work. Since precision and image quality are important though, it could end up being more trouble that it is worth. You may have better luck trying to find a used one.

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

#166

Post by jonathanzufi »

This is awesome.

Ubiquiti’s UniFi Protect app uses a similar UI for ‘smart detections’ and it’s really very nicely done / looks like you’ve achieved the same quality of cropping and layout in the snapshots. Bravo. So much potential for this. Good luck with it!

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

#167

Post by robotastic »

_yoqn wrote: post #112

That's the strangest looking Airbus I have ever seen... https://skybotstore.blob.core.windows.net/plane/a71efa_193_5...

ha! yea.... The camera itself doesn't know when a building gets in the way. I have some general stop angles, but it is not perfect. There is some ML in there to get rid of photos like this... but I guess the model things that air conditioners look like airplanes.

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

#168

Post by bambax »

ruforrel wrote: post #115
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.

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

It's somewhere south of Reagan DCA I think.

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

#169

Post by pidgin123 »

Amazing idea. I always wanted to make something like ths. We live about 3 miles (vector distance) from a local airport and this airport is middle of a 200 year old town, used pretty much for teaching how to fly! In summers, when we sit outside, it has rather become a big nuisance as there's a plane that creates sound pollution. I meant to gather facts as to how many "learn to fly" planes fly over the residential areas with inherent risk associated and many residents are also worried about the same.

Are you able to open source this setup and guide us thru some of the details? Your idea/implementation would actually help change the world into a better place.

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

#170

Post by motohagiography »

jhugo wrote: post #70
robotastic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a pilot, but played with ADS-B tracking several years ago, and my impression was below something like 4-5000' the transponder wasn't required to transmit location. This meant that surveillance aircraft (usually single engine propeller craft and helicopters) didn't send GPS, only the fact that it was in the air.
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