I See No Ships, But You Can Track Them with This Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-Powered Live AIS Display

Pseudonymous maker "EmbarrassedOctopus," hereafter simply "Octopus," has built an ePaper display with a difference: it uses an on-board radio, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, to track nearby ships and display both their size and their position.

"I made this project to show info about ships passing by on the river. From home we can just get a slight glimpse between the buildings and it made me curious about what these vessels are and where they were headed," Octopus explains. "There are 3 screens: geofence, table, and map. Map will show all vessels that have been heard from in the past 5 minutes. Table shows the most recent 20 vessels that have been seen, and geofence is the most recent vessel to enter a user defined area which I've set up to be right where we can see from the window."

The tracker works by picking up the signal from each vessel's on-board Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmitter. "The ships broadcast information about their status and position on two radio channels, around 161 and 162MHz," Octopus explains. "These broadcasts are intended for other ships to pick up but anyone with a receiver tuned correctly can listen in."

These signals are received by a Wegmatt Daisy Mini radio, connected along with the Pimoroni Inky Impression 7.3 ePaper display to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer. "In my project I'm using the Daisy to do the receiving and decoding of the radio signals sent out by the ships as they pass by on the river, then I wrote some code to turn the AVIDM output from the Daisy into structured data I can use for the screen information."

The result is the ability to display both the locations of and — as the message includes both the location of each ship's GPS receiver and the distance from it to the stern, bow, port, and starboard sides of the vessel — the rough size of the ship, though not a true outline. "I'd planned to show pictures of the actual ship," Octopus explains, "but there was no reasonably priced API I could find to do it with. In the end I prefer the blueprint because it means there is no internet required for it all to work."

More information is available in Octopus's Reddit post; "I'm planning to make some modifications to it so it supports the new [Pimoroni] Inky screen and has a setup/config page you can access via captive portal," the maker notes, "then make it open source once that's done."