I didn't know they still let children into the cockpit anymore!
I believe they still do after and possibly before the flight. They used to do it during the flight!
My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
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Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#72Idk why, but this is delightful to use. There’s something so fun about it. Will likely delete after a few days, but just turning it on and seeing the planes appear on a radar-like screen is just charming.
Thanks, that's great to hear :)
Will try not to toot my own horn, but I think the explicit goal of making it a toy vs making a commercialised product with ads/aggressive paywalling meant I could make something simple that gives nonzero value without any baggage
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#73Careful. This will be tolerated right up until you start building fire-control radars, at which point people with absolutely no sense of humor may take an unhealthy interest in you.
Maybe I'll make a lucrative exit to the military-industrial complex
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#74So cute! And of Sunday afternoon a flying saucer with green tractor beam came by to check out what the fuss was about.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#75Another fun project would be to build your own ADS-B receiver! https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/
Just a few weeks ago I got interested in this as well ("where does FR24 get its data from?"). I ended up buying a cheap RTL-SDR dongle (R820T2) and a small outdoor antenna. I run the free dump1090 tool (I'm on Fedora) to decode ADS-B messages, then my own simple "radar-like" visualization program ([1]) connects to dump1090's network socket to receive decoded data (SBS1 textual format). Even with the antenna just sitt…
I set one up a few months ago and was really surprised at how much coverage I got–I thought I might need an outdoor one, or at least to fiddle with it a bit, but even just plopped on my desk behind my computer screen on the ground floor of a three story house in a dense area I’m picking up planes from miles all around.
I built a little app that processes the data to count how many are flying low over the park nearby, so I can go there when it’s quiet: https://noisy.today/prospect-park/
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#76Great minds… I published something very similar (albeit less advanced) that also went viral on HN back in September: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379801 Mine is a webapp 80% generated by GPT that makes a sound when a plane enters a certain radius around the user’s location.
Oh awesome! Great minds indeed :) Honestly building a toy for my toddler is some of the most fun I've had coding in years, I can't wait for her to get a little older and start articulate her own ideas
I feel you. I have all kinds of ideas for when he gets a little bit older. For example: a voice-controlled (perhaps motion activated) electric train.
I think having a child gives me an excuse to express my inner child's passion for tinkering.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he has done is awesome. Yes, I misunderstood the title at first too, but that was more than made up by the care and attention put into building this app. Building things for your own kids just for the fun of it is what parents do. Stop dunking on people having fun.
They don't seem to be dunking. The title of the the piece/submission would be well served by calling it a simulated radar. I, like I suspect many others, clicked on it because I was honestly intrigued by the concept of some sort of homebrew radar. Setting that bar and then seeing that it's some API results plotted on a simulated radar screen is a bit of a letdown. Submission is clickbait. It's a cool project, sounds…
Thank you. I clicked thinking that I was gonna see someone's home made radar.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#78Off topic but you have my exact name (first and last). I wonder what the chances are on that.
numerically, quite low, but given the number of people on the internet, it happens routinely. I'd guess most English speaking people have used for their name and found duplicates So: guess maybe 100 million English names on the internet, between 2 and 100 matches, so around 1 in 10 million BTW. I got bored counting the matches for Jacob Bartlett on facebook. definitely more than 10
I've never met anyone (outside known relatives) with my spelling of surname. When I moved to my current UK city I was surprised to find a Firstname Lastname match in the same city.
Facebook shows dozens of the same name in the general area.
As I've seen some say, if you're one-in-a-million then there's ~7000 people like you out there somewhere!
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#79Careful. This will be tolerated right up until you start building fire-control radars, at which point people with absolutely no sense of humor may take an unhealthy interest in you.
"A fire-control radar (FCR) is a radar that is designed specifically to provide information (mainly target azimuth, elevation, range and range rate) to a fire-control system in order to direct weapons such that they hit a target. They are sometimes known as narrow beam radars,[1] targeting radars, or in the UK, gun-laying radars. If the radar is used to guide a missile, it is often known as a target illuminator or illuminator radar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-control_radar
That was a new one for me.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#80This is cool in concept, but FlightRadar24 has a built-in Augmented Reality feature that works really well. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/show-us-your-best-augment... Also, if I were to build my own local copy, I'd use an RTLSDR to get the ADSB packets direct and base my app on tar1090. https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090
MSFS (MS Flight Simulator) has real-time Flight and Weather data and works in Steam's Proton fork of WINE on Linux.
FWICS there are third-party open source tools for adding live Flight data and logical behaviors to flight simulator applications.
https://fslivetrafficliveries.com/user-guide/ :
> FSLTL is a free standalone real-time online traffic overhaul and VATSIM model-matching solution for MSFS.
(... Til about FlyPadOS3 EFB: An EFB is intended primarily for cockpit/flightdeck or cabin use. For large and turbine aircraft, FAR 91.503 requires the presence of navigational charts on the airplane. If an operator's sole source of navigational chart information is contained on an EFB, the operator must demonstrate the EFB will continue to operate throughout a decompression event, and thereafter, regardless of altitude. https://docs.flybywiresim.com/fbw-a32nx/feature-guides/flypa...)
https://twinfan.gitbook.io/livetraffic/ :
> LiveTraffic is a plugin for the flight simulator X-Plane to show real-life traffic, based on publicly available live flight data, as additional planes within X-Plane. [...]
> I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the inaccuracies of the data sources, see [Limitations]. There are only timestamps and positions. Heading and speed is point-in-time info but not a reliable vector to the next position. There is no information on pitch or bank angle, or on gear or flaps positions. There is no info where exactly a plane touched or left ground. There are several data feeders, which aren't in synch and contradict each other.
...
"Google Earth 3D Models Now Available as Open Standard (GlTF)" (2023) ; land, buildings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896176
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/3d-til... :
> Photorealistic 3D Tiles are a 3D mesh textured with high resolution imagery. They offer high-resolution 3D maps in many of the world's populated areas. They let you power next-generation, immersive 3D visualization experiences to [...]
GMaps WebGL overlay API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
...
From "GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38267794 :
> TIL about Raspberry-NOAA and pywws in researching and summarizing for a comment on "Nrsc5: Receive NRSC-5 digital radio stations using an RTL-SDR dongle" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38158091
...
"Show HN: I wrote a multicopter simulation library in Python" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38255362 :
> [ X-Plane Plane Maker, Juno: New Origins (and also Hello Engineer), MS Flight Simulator cockpits are built with MSFS Avionics Framework which is React-based, [Multi-objective gym + MuJoCo] for drone simulation, cfd and helicopters ]
...
"DroneAid: A Symbol Language and ML model for indicating needs to drones, planes" (2020) https://github.com/Code-and-Response/DroneAid https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707347 ... https://github.com/Call-for-Code/Project-Catalog