The Minimalist Airframe Details Your Closest Commercial Flight on a Color ePaper Display
No SDR required: minimalist project pairs a Pimoroni Inky Impression with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, downloading ADS-B data over Wi-Fi.
Pseudonymous maker "meandmybadself," hereafter simply "Self," has built an ePaper display with only one job: providing flight details for the current-closest commercial flight going over its owner's head, courtesy of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a connection to a free Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast ADS-B database.
"Airframe shows you the closest commercial flight overhead," Self explains of the project. "It's a gift for a friend who lives in the flight path of MSP (Minneapolis St. Paul) airport. [It meant] learning about all the loopholes and idiosyncrasies in aircraft data."
It's easy to look up into the sky and see a plane going overhead, but it's harder to figure out exactly what the plane is — even if you happen to have a high-powered telescope to hand. Thankfully, commercial flights are required to broadcast position and identification data automatically using Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) — data that can be be picked up not only by airports and other aircraft but by anyone with a radio turned to the right frequency.
In Self's case, there's no software-defined radio involved: the display, housed in a 3D-printed fame, pairs a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer with a Pimoroni Inky Impression 7.3" color ePaper display panel. The Raspberry Pi connects to the user's Wi-Fi network and performs a query for its location on a publicly-accessible ADS-B database, displaying the results on-screen with a one-minute refresh rate.
"We have the [aircraft] model, but the scheduling data is all locked up behind paywalls," Self explains of the selection of data available to display. "Would love to find a free source somewhere. [It updates] once a minute currently, but that's just because the screen currently takes 37 seconds to update. Working on fixing that now."
More information on the project is available in Self's Reddit post; no source code has been published, but Self says it is based on Fatih Ak's InkyPi project — and, if the code gets cleaned up, may even be contributed as a plug-in for the project.