Holy crap! I’ve been considering nearly the exact same project.
We live under the flight path for the local airport. I’ve wanted to build exactly this. Like, literally exactly this. This is just way more polished than I could have built.
Future product would be cool to stick this behind a mirror to make it a bit more interior decor approved.
Very cool project. I would like a text message or a log that I could go to with timestamps and aircraft details along with the date. Is there such a service or app?
Fun project! I've been slowly working at something similar that pulls tail numbers of overflying planes, grabs an image of the actual plane from jetphotos, and displays it along with flight info on a little LED screen.
I'm often awoken by aviation flying over South East London at 6AM in the morning. This might be a good thing to look at during those times...
(I wear earplugs and have double glazing, but the noise is deep and penetrating. I wonder how many other hundreds of thousands of people are also disturbed by early morning planes...)
If you like this, you’d probably really enjoy the hobby of ADS-B tracking. If you have a spare Pi sitting around, you can get an SDR and decent starter antenna for under $100. It’s also a fun entry point into other radio and satellite stuff. Airplanes.live is a good place to start.
I wonder how hard it would be to combine this with a camera and some kind of image processing to actually create a live view video of the adjacent window with the planes annotated. That would be like the world’s coolest screen saver.
Really cool project, though I’d recommend going with 3 or 4 64x64 LED matrix panels instead of 20 16x16 panels since it’s a lot less work with assembly and wiring and the end result is the same.
There are also pre-built LED matrix controller boards including an existing drawing library like the Interstate75 which I can recommend.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadWe live under the flight path for the local airport. I’ve wanted to build exactly this. Like, literally exactly this. This is just way more polished than I could have built.
Future product would be cool to stick this behind a mirror to make it a bit more interior decor approved.
(I wear earplugs and have double glazing, but the noise is deep and penetrating. I wonder how many other hundreds of thousands of people are also disturbed by early morning planes...)
There are also pre-built LED matrix controller boards including an existing drawing library like the Interstate75 which I can recommend.
https://github.com/pimoroni/interstate75
https://tidbyt.com/