Colin Waddell's Chunky Fridge Magnet Is a Live Display of Overhead Aircraft Driven by a Raspberry Pi
Taking up zero desk space, this eye-catching display tracks live flights — or the weather, if there's nothing in the air.
Developer and self-described "electronics guy" Colin Waddell has put together a fridge magnet art piece that tracks live aircraft flights over his house.
"Once the lockdown restrictions started to ease off my wife and I quickly realise the serene neighborhood we’d moved into was directly on the flight path for Glasgow airport," Waddell explains of the project's inspiration. "We're far enough away that the windows don’t always shake but close enough to start noticing the difference in how each plane sounds. How cool would it be to say, 'that sounds like an Engine Alliance GP7000, must be an Airbus A380?' Not very, but that didn’t put me off building something to tell me what aircraft are nearby."
Not willing to sacrifice desk space to the project, Waddell set about building something with a near-zero footprint: an oversized fridge magnet in a custom wooden casing. The front is dominated by an Adafruit 32×64 LED matrix that serves as the display, behind which is an Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer.
"Power comes from a 5V supply brick normally used for powering LED light strips. That cable is nowhere near tasty enough for the project so the plug was been swapped out for a Lemo 0B push-pull connector and paired with its panel-mount partner," Waddell explains. "Any excuse I'll use these, they are gorgeous — totally the wrong kind of connector for the job, but gorgeous."
The build is finished with a compact power toggle, complete with LED at its tip, and a Veroboard panel to keep the wiring neat. On the software side, the display is driven from Python with a program pulling down live flight data including origin and destination, flight number, and make and model of aircraft — all fed to a custom animation engine to scroll the information neatly across the low-resolution LED matrix.
"Flight information is being polled using the official FlightRadar24 Python module," Waddell explains. "I've wrapped this up in some of my own code, overhead.py, to help format the data and perform some rate limiting on how many requests I'm making to FlightRadar24. When there’s no flight overhead the screen displays the current date, time, and the temperature outside."
Waddell's full project write-up is available on his website, while the source code has been published to GitHub under an unspecified open-source license.
