Don E. Llopis' Skies-adsb Is a "Virtual Aquarium" for Real Aircraft, Picked Up by a Raspberry Pi SDR

Developer Don E. Llopis has put together a web app designed to pick up nearby aircraft using a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver — then map them in 3D space as an interactive map.

"Skies-adsb is a virtual plane spotting progressive web app (PWA)/virtual aquarium (with aircraft instead of fish)/interactive real-time simulation," Llopis explains of the project, which was brought to our attention by RTL-SDR. "Aircraft are tracked via unfiltered ADS-B transponder data in real-time and rendered in 3D."

Like many projects that track aircraft via their Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals, skies-adsb is designed to be relatively lightweight: its target device is a Raspberry Pi single-board computer connected to a low-cost receive-only RTL-SDR dongle.

Once installed, the tool uses the RTL-SDR to listen out for nearby aircraft; once detected, they're presented as geometric shapes showing location, altitude, heading, and speed in real time. Clicking on any aircraft pulls up an information window, showing a photograph of the plane pulled from Planespotters.net and status information from the FlightAware API.

"The app is written using WebGL+HTML5+CSS+JavaScript and it works on all of the latest major browsers: Chrome (Desktop+Mobile), Firefox (Desktop), and Safari (Desktop+Mobile)," Llopis explains. "The controls are design to be mobile/tablet friendly."

The project source code, installation instructions, and more information on the development stack are all available on Llopis' GitHub repository under the permissive MIT license.