Pi-Sky flight-tracking dashboard

Build a local flight-tracking dashboard on Raspberry Pi with live maps, history, and replay. Pi-Sky flight-tracking dashboard. Pi Towers was eerily quiet this Maker Monday, as we were all enjoying a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK… so, we’ve made the executive decision to celebrate on a Tuesday instead.

Let’s dig into this excellent tutorial by James Mitchell, showing you how to build a local flight-tracking dashboard on Raspberry Pi with live maps, history, and replay. Ever looked up and wondered where that plane you spotted is going to or where it came from. Commercial flight trackers show aircraft worldwide, but depending on how much data you want or how much you’re willing to pay, having live usable data in hand can be rare.

With a Raspberry Pi and an ADS-B 1090MHz receiver, builders can decode those open radio broadcasts from nearby aircraft and can spy into what is going on overhead. Flight GAF866 flyby at ILA Berlin Air Show What aircraft transmit and how we receive it ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast. Most modern aircraft broadcast ADS-B on 1090MHz in short bursts, several times per second, carrying an ICAO hex address (an identification number assigned to a specific aircraft), a callsign (air traffic control identifier for aircraft – for example, RYR3EM), GPS position, altitude, speed, track, vertical rate, and squawk code.

What is not sent in the broadcast is what type of aircraft it is, where the flight came from, where it’s going, when it departed, or will arrive.