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My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

jacobbartlett.substack.com

41–50 of 257 posts

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#41
post #23

I occasionally get large military transport planes that buzz my rural area at very low altitudes, often below my house in a canyon just a 3 iron away. I suppose they're training. The roar is epic. It'd be nice to get a little notification when that's about to happen. Not enough to write my own app for it though. Kudos for the hustle.

That's a really great little niche market, it's times like this I wish I was more entreprenurial

Thank you for the kudos :)

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#42

This 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

what children truly want, need, and enjoy, is interaction with adults, and the less augmented the reality of the human contact, the real-er it is. build something that doesn't work so well with them, rather than off the shelf something perfect.

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#43
This is great. On my « one day » build list.

In a similar vein, my 5yr old son has a flight log book - I started it for him as a baby. Every flight he gives asks one of the crew if the captain wouldn’t mind completing it. It logs route, aircraft and any events that happened. The crew _love_ this kind of thing - we’ve toured cockpits and crew rests and the messages are always gracious. He’s always beaming to get it back. Highly recommend it for little plane geeks.

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#45
post #39

I swear there are startups that blabber for years before making an MVP.. Jacob was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps..

In the interests of appeal to modesty, I can tell you about my long history of unreleased apps, failed startups, and false starts :)

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#46

This 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

That is very awesome, TIL

If I were commercially-minded (I'm not), I'd go full hog on the Mattel approach and carve out the niche as a toy vs an informational product

Re: My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

#48
post #43

This is great. On my « one day » build list. In a similar vein, my 5yr old son has a flight log book - I started it for him as a baby. Every flight he gives asks one of the crew if the captain wouldn’t mind completing it. It logs route, aircraft and any events that happened. The crew _love_ this kind of thing - we’ve toured cockpits and crew rests and the messages are always gracious. He’s always beaming to get it ba…

That's genius, being invited into the cockpit felt extremely cool even as a grown adult, so I will absolutely get this started next time we get a flight
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