Have you ever wondered where the planes passing overhead go? Now you know! Known as the makers of Reddit. C0wsaysmoocreated a flight tracking matrix powered by a Raspberry Pi. Not only can you see which planes are passing overhead, but you can also see the current weather forecast at a glance.
This matrix is based on The Fridge Flight Tracker, a project created by another Reddit user. mynis account. C0wsaysmoo used this as a template and enhanced it with some new features. The main screen is configured to display the current time and date. Temperatures are also displayed, and it also provides weather forecasts for three days at a time.
The second screen is dedicated to the flight tracking side of the project. Now here’s where things get interesting. Pi uses its current position to estimate which plane is passing. Then you will see details about these flights such as route, flight number, plane type, airline and flight direction.
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For this project, C0wsaysmoo uses a Raspberry Pi 3 A+, but there’s no reason why you can’t use something smaller like the Raspberry Pi Zero or even bigger like the latest Raspberry Pi 4. This is connected to a controlled 64 x 32 pixel RGB matrix panel. Uses Adafruit bonnet. Everything is housed in a wooden box and finished with a colored acrylic cover in front of the screen.
C0wsaysmoo has kindly open sourced the project, making it completely free for anyone who wants to explore the code. For details on how it works, please refer to the following site: Github There are also some behind-the-scenes photos of it in action. Flight Tracker’s software is primarily driven by Python, Flight Radar APIan open source flight tracking API.
Overall, this is a very polished and well-finished Raspberry Pi project. It looks great on a shelf and is fun to build as well as to look at. Check out the original thread shared by C0wsaysmoo reddit Take a closer look at how it works and be sure to follow us for more cool projects and future updates on this project.
