Teaching Alexa to Spot Airplanes

Nick Sypteras recently moved into an apartment that gives him an excellent view of passing airplanes. Though most would just accept them as an interesting curiosity, self-described “airplane fanatic” Sypteras would often check what planes were passing on the website FlightRadar24.com. Eventually, this process became cumbersome, so he taught Alexa to do the task for him!

Besides an Amazon Echo Dot, all that was needed to accomplish this task was a Raspberry Pi, and a device called an RTL-SDR USB Dongle. The dongle receives Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) messages from passing airplanes, which is then sent to the Pi.

By plugging the dongle into the Raspberry Pi (and placing by a window with an unobstructed view), and with the help of some open source software, the Pi can be turned into a cheap ADS-B decoder/server.

From here, several clever tricks are used to scrape data for planes, and to choose which one is likely in view based on proximity to Sypteras’ window. Now all he has to do is ask Alexa to “open what plane is that,” and it replies back with info on the nearby aircraft, including registration number, model and operator.

Want to read more about Sypteras’ plane identifier? Be sure to check out his blog post here, and his code on GitHub if you’d like to try this experiment yourself.