Wesley Mitchell's Raspberry Pi Flight Tracker Puts Local Aircraft on a Quartet of 64×64 LED Matrices

Receiving ADS-B signals using an RTL-SDR, this Python-driven display maps out nearby aircraft in real-time.

Gareth Halfacree
2 months agoHW101 / Python on Hardware

Maker Wesley Mitchell has put a quartet of 64×64 RGB LED matrices and a Raspberry Pi to work tracking nearby aircraft, using data gathered by an RTL-SDR software-defined radio dongle.

"I built this flight tracker from four 64×64 LED matrices, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a[n] RTL-SDR dongle," Mitchell explains of the project, which provides live tracking of aircraft within radio range. "I am using Dump 1090 [ADS-B software] and RTL-SDR to receive ADS-B data from aircraft."

The Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system sees aircraft broadcasting their current locations to anyone who'll listen — and while that's traditional air traffic control or other aircraft, there's nothing to stop anyone with curiosity and a suitable radio receiver from picking up the same signals.

In Mitchell's case, that receiver is a low-cost receive-only RTL-SDR dongle — based on hardware originally designed to pick up TV signals, but now a go-to gadget for cheap software-defined radio projects. The signals from nearby aircraft are decoded by the open source Dump 1090 software, then mapped onto the LED matrices using a Python package Mitchell developed for the purpose.

More information is available in Mitchell's Reddit thread, with source code available on GitHub under an unspecified license.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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