This project is called Planeview and was inspired by the nice view that I have out of my dining room window. I can see planes approaching and departing SFO through the opening of the canyon I live in. It's fun to watch and wonder where they're coming from or heading to, but it would be even more fun to know ;).
I also had some Sparkfun LCD displays that I bought years ago, and collected dust with. Now I had a rad project to use them with! Funny story there though.
So here's where I got to.
Very simple, a screen wired up to an Arduino with a serial interface to display text on the screen. This plugs into a Raspi running a python script. The python script sends a list of plane data to display. The plane data comes from the OpenSky API, which kindly provides plane data within a rectangle. From there I filter the planes not inside the view triangle/ polygon that I mapped out using Google Earth.
One of the trickiest bits was translating between the different GPS coordinate systems. After some trial and error I had the coordinates that worked. When there are no planes the display runs Conway's Game of Life.
Here's some more build photos:
I decided to go with wire wrapping for this project. Of course I had to solder all the header pins on. The wire wrapping was definitely the right choice here. The rest of the construction turned out nice as well. I used some plexi from a Raspi enclosure kit that I had lying around. I also used this project as an excuse to buy some standoff kits that are very handy. But after finishing all the wiring, and deploying the display, I found the backpack board that I had also bought with the displays >_< lol. Basically 80% of the wire wrapping wiring that I had worked on was taken care of by the backpack board. It had been so long since I ordered these parts I had forgotten about it.
Oh well! I enjoyed it.
For my next trick, I will be replacing the display+Arduino with the backpack and an ESP8266 and querying OpenSky directly. I plan on reclaiming the Raspi for other things...
