There's a really cool setup at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vZjWb5n6E&t=1s
My son can spend hours just waiting for planes landing in SFO.
My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
121–130 of 257 posts
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#122So many people say: "Don't take young kids abroad, they won't really remember those travels." BS. I took my son to Brazil, it was great, we got on a $1 cab ride, got on a pirate ship, endless alpine slide after the aerial tram, and went to the Botanical Garden in Rio. (He did say: "that day was totally boring, we didn't do anything!", but I know it was the greatest day of his life, and I can point out all those things to him and he'll not demur).
Later, I took my three kids to Barcelona and Greece. They don't remember the time we took a bus from Athens to the beach and they were rolling around on the dirty floor of a bus, but they do remember the Abba-themed wedding.
Those experiences matter.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#123Advice for a wholesome activity with your daughter: Bring her to the closest road/parking lot/park at the inbound end of your closest international airport runway (Typically this changes based on wind direction). Park and watch the planes come in and land. She can use her "radar" to see which planes are coming in (we used flightradar24). My kids were FLOORED how close the planes get to the ground on approach - especially the bigger jetliners. Easily entertained for hours and had to bargain with them to leave because they wanted to see if the next plane was bigger/closer than the last.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#124Advice for a wholesome activity with your daughter: Bring her to the closest road/parking lot/park at the inbound end of your closest international airport runway (Typically this changes based on wind direction). Park and watch the planes come in and land. She can use her "radar" to see which planes are coming in (we used flightradar24). My kids were FLOORED how close the planes get to the ground on approach - especi…
Bring some earmuffs.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#125[flagged]
I'm surprised this is getting downvoted: Completely different type of project and misleading headline. Still a cool project!
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#126Advice for a wholesome activity with your daughter: Bring her to the closest road/parking lot/park at the inbound end of your closest international airport runway (Typically this changes based on wind direction). Park and watch the planes come in and land. She can use her "radar" to see which planes are coming in (we used flightradar24). My kids were FLOORED how close the planes get to the ground on approach - especi…
When I was in high school, there was a gravel lot just outside of the airport perimeter fencing at the end of one of the runways. When the wind was going the right direction so that the airplanes were taking off over that lot, it was the place to park and make out.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#127I love the design but go one step further - forget the API and get an SDR that is tuned to ADB frequencies at 1090 Mhz and gather the data yourself. Then she'll have a true radar. Edit: fair point on what a radar is, today I re-remembered :)
Nice app and writeup - but she won't have a radar - she'll have an app that displays the positions of airplanes. A true radar needs to transmit and receive. The SDR is still just listening to the telemetry from the plane, which they transmit all the time for this ADS mode.
You can have passive radar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar
But yes, it needs to be doing more than receiving telemetry to qualify, and there has to be something transmitting.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#128Nice! Minor nits: * It takes me out of the immersion a bit when planes move after having been drawn. It would feel more realistic if the blips were "painted" by the sweep and then static until the next sweep. * To make it a bit more realistic you could extrapolate from previous data points so each plane would make consistent progress from sweep to sweep.
Thank you :) Both very valid points. I think if I was clever with timing and angles the first one is definitely doable. The second one woudl be even simpler - the API returns flight velocity so I can even calculate this from one data point
I suggest adjusting your gradient so they don't fully fade out until just before the sweep hits them, or maybe even only down to 10%, so they only get wiped by the bar. It'll make it much easier to watch a plane if it doesn't keep disappearing entirely.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#129So many people say: "Don't take young kids abroad, they won't really remember those travels." BS. I took my son to Brazil, it was great, we got on a $1 cab ride, got on a pirate ship, endless alpine slide after the aerial tram, and went to the Botanical Garden in Rio. (He did say: "that day was totally boring, we didn't do anything!", but I know it was the greatest day of his life, and I can point out all those thing…
Very off topic, but I +1 this. I am half and half and as a baby and young kid we went to one spot every summary. To this day I remember these travels. They matter a lot indeed.
Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar
#130I wrote a simple program that connects to (default) port 30003 on dump1090-fa (Flightaware version). It parses the ADS-B output and uses Flightaware's AeroAPI (there is a free tier based on requests) to augment with airline, aircraft, and city departure information. I then publish to my MQTT (Mosquitto) broker for planes within 2.1 nautical miles (i.e. I can visually make them out). An MQTT client on an RPi3 (Linux)…
> then use Linux USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part.
> Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part.
Only if you're not using ffmpeg or (c)vlc.