Become an Air Traffic Controller From Your Living Room

Data, data, data — it’s the new oil. And for those who live and breathe technology, there is never enough of it. They want to know not only what is going on around the world, but what is going on right around them. This urge has driven many hardware hackers to build weather stations, air quality monitors, and a wide range of custom sensors designed to peel back the curtain on the invisible forces of their immediate environments.

For Przemek Wasinski, it’s airplanes that are of interest. He wants to know where they are, where they came from, and where they are going. To satisfy this desire, Wasinski created a DIY ADS-B plane tracking ground station. It was assembled from user-friendly, off-the-shelf components, so it can be easily reproduced if you also happen to have an interest in aviation.

The tracker is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer. A NESDR Mini USB ADS-B receiver and antenna are used to collect data broadcast by nearby airplanes. To round out the hardware, Wasinski included a 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display to visualize airplane location information.

As data is collected, it is uploaded to a Firebase Realtime Database. An application built with PyGame then displays it on the Touch Display. Radar-like rings measure distance, and airport locations are also indicated on the map. A menu allows the user to zoom in and out or pause the movement of the planes.

Using the current setup, Wasinski can track planes at a distance of up to 150 kilometers. He is considering getting a larger antenna to extend that range even further. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can grab the source code from GitHub.