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My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

jacobbartlett.substack.com

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

#81

Post by farhaven »

fsckboy wrote: post #42
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #28

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.

This rings true. I remember the wooden toy biplane my dad made in his wood shop when I was a kid a lot more fondly than all the other bought plastic toys that came after it.

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

#82

Post by auspiv »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #69
filterfiber wrote: post #63

If anyone is interested, you can build your own adsb receiver for very cheap (under 50$), and you can forward the data to all the platforms - ADSB-exchange, airplanes.live, flightradar, flightaware, etc. You'll get the business tier plans on the commercial sites for free, and you'll feed the community exchanges. You'll also be getting the data directly, so they aren't censored, and don't rely on the internet.

I bet this'd be a lot more reliable than the free API I'm using (no hate to OpenSky though they were very nice and clear to me when I emailed them)

yep and you also can get multiple updates per second per plane. I think it tops out at 8 or so which is entirely unnecessary for the radar-style app but you can count on an update between each "scan".

https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-an...

https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft...

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

#83

Post by auspiv »

progne wrote: 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.

The military planes are hit or miss for what they put out in terms of position. Most will do Mode S transponder, which does not, by itself, include position. But if you get enough of these ADS-B receivers in an area, they can triangulate the position.

Every few weeks we have "mean jets" (what our 3 year old calls fighter jets, I think from the Iron Giant) buzz our house near KBJC going in for landing/taking off. They're super loud and often gone before you can get outside to see them (they leave at 400+ kts).

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

#84

Post by dylan604 »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #45
dazhbog wrote: 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 :)

if you're anything like me, you have a stash of items that you just haven't gotten to yet but have every intention of doing something with at some point. law of averages suggests one of them will hit!

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

#85

Post by idatum »

I 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) subscribes to those messages and uses a TTS service (Azure) to generate a wave file. I then use USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) to play it to me while I sit on my patio and watch local planes fly by.

I live near a couple major airports, so most of the planes are easy to spot (~5000 MSL). It's a simple pleasure.

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

#86

Post by auspiv »

sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #8

[flagged]

Kraken SDR has 5 receivers, all synchronized to the same time. There was a "passive" radar project that used its hardware but got shutdown.

https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-ta...

apparently passive radar is governed by some US Munitions list:

US Munitions List, Category 11(a)(3)(xxvii): Bi-static/multi-static radar that exploits greater than 125 kHz bandwidth and is lower than 2 GHz center frequency to passively detect or track using radio frequency (RF) transmissions (e.g., commercial radio, television stations);

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

#87

Post by alexpotato »

idatum wrote: post #85

I 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.

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

#88

Post by hotnfresh »

sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #77
llm_nerd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I clicked because I was excited to see the story of their unexpected interaction with the FCC and FAA (or local equivalents) due to putting out that much EM radiation in those spectra. But no. Still cool, though.

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

#90

Post by lloydatkinson »

victor106 wrote: post #89

> Which begs the question, why can’t Google Maps ever work out which direction I am facing? I always wondered this as well. Apple Maps seems to be much better at this

It used to do it fine and then they had an update that made it terrible. You need to hold your phone flat, if it’s at even a slight angle it stops working.
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