[HN Gopher] I built a system that takes pictures of all the airp...
___________________________________________________________________
I built a system that takes pictures of all the airplanes that fly
over my house
Author : tosh
Score : 686 points
Date : 2022-01-22 18:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| joelbondurant1 wrote:
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Fascinating: from a very quick scroll it is surprising to see how
| much traffic is to do with banks.
|
| Wilmington Trust, Bank of Utah, Wells Fargo, "UMB Bank" (?), US
| Bank. Is it really the case that a quarter of US air traffic is
| rich people in suits who are too good for Zoom? :)
|
| Edit: answered here, I believe:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041181
| vivekv wrote:
| Wow there is a plane roughly every 2-3 minutes even at 1 am. You
| should be living pretty close to the airport for that kind of
| traffic? I really don't know how about the traffic density is in
| various places. Since they are mostly over 30k i assume noise is
| not an issue ? Would it be possible to mount a omnidirectional
| mic along with the camera to see if you capture any sounds ?
| musicale wrote:
| > Wow there is a plane roughly every 2-3 minutes even at 1 am.
|
| US cities and surrounding areas have turned into air traffic
| hell.
|
| Loud, low-frequency noise is particularly awful and is
| basically inescapable 24/7.
|
| NextGen seems to have made things much worse since 2015 or so.
| 15characterslon wrote:
| How much does it cost to run this on Azure?
| robotastic wrote:
| Good question - I just checked and my forecast for the month is
| $65... but I have a few other things running. One of the perks
| of working at Microsoft is that you get $150 monthly credit, so
| I didn't work too hard to keep the costs low. I could save a
| little by combining the API and App server.
| dt3ft wrote:
| This is very cool, great idea and execution! :)
| kingcharles wrote:
| So, if I put one of these on top of an RV and parked it near
| Groom Lake, does anyone know if the flying saucers leaving Area
| 51 are transmitting ADS-B?
| netcyrax wrote:
| This is extremely cool!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Sorely disappointed you didn't sneak in a UFO.
| chopsuei3 wrote:
| Very slick! Were you using PiAware or listening to ADSB prior to
| this project?
|
| I remember starting a similar project years ago when I got my
| first RTL-SDR adapter - didn't get too far, but probably cheaper
| than this setup
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160228105159/http://simonaubur...
| jonathanzufi wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| Ubiquiti's UniFi Protect app uses a similar UI for 'smart
| detections' and it's really very nicely done / looks like you've
| achieved the same quality of cropping and layout in the
| snapshots. Bravo. So much potential for this. Good luck with it!
| soheil wrote:
| I feel like FBI is gonna be knocking on the door any time now.
| It'd be cool to calculate the velocity and display that. It looks
| like one of the planes is specially going fast.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is one of those things I always wanted to work on, but never
| got around to. Though, the execution on this is probably a lot
| more slick than I would have done. Well done!
| [deleted]
| soheil wrote:
| Why are there so many banks with airplanes? Is it to transfer all
| the gold between their branches?
| robotastic wrote:
| Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here.
| Happy to answer any questions.
|
| To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft
| registration data to pull up the extra information about the
| planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating
| it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware
| have much better data, but a pricy to look up.
| mormegil wrote:
| For aircraft registration data, I think offline database
| download should be available without (paid) API access on some
| smaller services. I thought ADSBX was providing the aircraft
| database but cannot find it right now. Quick googling found
| opensky-network, but not sure how much is the database
| maintained. (Monthly snapshot keep being published, though.)
| efreak wrote:
| Do some airlines not provide details, or is that some other
| issue? I'm seeing a flight 3C7601 that shows -1 passengers and
| -1 engines. Same for 4007f3 from British airways and 394a06
| from air France. A8060C seems to have something in the way,
| it's just gray with a black stripe
| jcims wrote:
| Your site got hugged to saturation but this is something I've
| been wanting to do for a while. I just got a sort-of ridiculous
| telescope (Celestron 11" SCT on alt/az mount, 2800mm focal
| length) and have been tinkering with ADSB for years. Can't wait
| to check out your work!
| robotastic wrote:
| That would be awesome! How fast can those mounts move? Would
| they be able to follow an aircraft? I have found that more
| zoom actually makes things a little tricker because you have
| to make sure it is leveled and aligned precisely. When my
| camera is fully zoomed, it has about 1 degree vertical field
| of view.
| mackmgg wrote:
| I've got a 6" Celestron, and I think it would be capable of
| following a plane that's sufficiently high up. It can slew
| a max of 5deg/sec, so that would be ~500mph at 10000' or
| well over 1500mph at 30000'.
|
| Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at
| night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as
| for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no
| reason you couldn't align it to stars at night and it will
| its alignment pretty precisely. I'm not sure how much drift
| there is in that over say 24+ hours though. It's also smart
| enough with the Celestron controller to never point at the
| sun even during a slew. I'm not sure if it has that same
| safety feature when controlled from a computer, which would
| be a major concern with daytime use.
|
| But a 6" f/10 (so ~1500mm lens) telescope with a full frame
| camera is still a 1deg field of view so the same as you
| have now. Smaller sensor would be tighter field of view.
|
| And of course the obvious drawback: None of this setup
| would be weatherproof
| robotastic wrote:
| That is interesting! There is this cool piece of software
| that looked like it helped with a lot of this. It did
| visual object tracking with telescopes... but it is no
| longer available:
| http://www.optictracker.com/What_is_it.html
|
| Alignment has been a big pain for me. I might actually
| have to look at how to use stars to correctly position
| everything.
| aimor wrote:
| What would you have to change to capture helicopters too?
| robotastic wrote:
| It should work for helicopters. In DC, alot of them do not
| have ADS-B and the flight paths are a little different, so I
| haven't managed to capture one yet though.
| zyang wrote:
| Are you filtering out military planes?
| jhugo wrote:
| There's no reason to if they are flying with ADS-B
| transmitting. They're broadcasting their position and will
| usually appear on FR24 etc.
|
| If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the
| military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system
| so no filtering needed.
| btbuilder wrote:
| According to [1] it's not just the military, but "U.S.
| federal, state and local government aircraft performing
| sensitive operations"
|
| https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/07/23/new-rule-allows-
| mil...
| jhugo wrote:
| Correct, GP asked about military so I mentioned that it's
| legal for them to turn it off. It's also legal for
| intelligence, law enforcement, etc -- anything
| government-related with a good reason pretty much.
| nojs wrote:
| Alternatively, you could use computer vision and only
| record the ones _not_ transmitting - that would be an
| interesting data set!
| Lammy wrote:
| Phantom planes are also technically possible. One could
| even do it themselves using the "Havok" firmware for HackRF
| One. I won't link to it, but to quote its wiki, "Yes, it
| works. For real. If you want to try it out, DO NOT transmit
| on restricted bands and ESPECIALLY NOT on 1090MHz."
| phire wrote:
| Yes, 1090MHz is probably the stupidest bad to illegally
| transmit on.
|
| Not just because of the potential safety issue, but
| because of how easy it is to track you.
|
| In many areas, they have Wide Area Multilateration
| equipment installed that will show the real location of
| the transmitter, instead of the fake GPS coordinates you
| transmit. Normally it's there to double-check the ADS-B
| coordinates are correct, to track older planes without
| ADS-B, and to give true altitude readings, but it will
| track illegal transmitters as a side effect.
|
| Even in areas where they haven't installed a permanent
| MLAT system, they usually have some sort of equipment
| that can track down a 1090MHz transponder. For-example,
| search and rescue planes often carry one.
| chopsuei3 wrote:
| If you upload data with PiAware or something similar,
| FlightAware gives you an Enterprise level account, not sure if
| that offers API benefits though -
| https://flightaware.com/commercial/premium/#subscriptions
| https://blog.flightaware.com/201802-free-benefits-with-your-...
| robotastic wrote:
| oh yea! great point, I forgot about that. I am using PiAware
| to handle the decoding so I do have an Enterprise Account. I
| will have to check if I can make API calls for free.
| phita wrote:
| Unfortunately FlightAware Enterprise doesn't get discounted
| API access.
|
| The FlightAware API I was using (they have multiple) didn't
| provide all the data I wanted either. The ADSB Exchange
| Rapid API was more comprehensive, but came at a cost.
|
| The aircraft don't broadcast everything over ADSB - so
| these sites are all pulling from a database somewhere else.
| It appears ADSB Exchange and some of the pi based UIs use
| the tar1090-db. This was easy to work with and free - just
| need to update it periodically due to registration changes.
|
| https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db
| johnflan wrote:
| Very cool, how do you get the camera to point to the right
| place?
| robofanatic wrote:
| Cool
| b33j0r wrote:
| I had this exact idea and have been working on it. Have almost
| exactly your bill of materials. Glad to know there are others
| out there who find this interesting, great work!
|
| I was always worried about making it a public data source.
| Kinda seems like it could be potentially dangerous, but that's
| completely paranoid speculation. Thanks for sharing!
| b33j0r wrote:
| I should clarify that I'm mostly guessing on your bill of
| materials. There are only a few obvious choices for this
| project.
| robotastic wrote:
| I posted a bit more on what I am using on the About page:
| http://skybot.cam/about
|
| I got all the camera gear on ebay, which was lucky.
|
| I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't
| anything too crazy about making it public. I am also still
| trying to figure out if it is actually useful for
| anything... besides getting unlimited plane photos!
| notahacker wrote:
| > I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there
| isn't anything too crazy about making it public.
|
| The only non-public information you're making available
| is the approximate location of your house!
|
| It's a very high end approach to planespotting though.
| People used to just tick off serial numbers in books :D
| b33j0r wrote:
| I'm doing tensorflow on an nvidia jetson. Indeed, slowly.
| Thanks for sharing those details on your project!
| busheezy wrote:
| If you set up an ADB, Flight Aware will give you an Enterprise
| account. FlightRadar24 also will give you a Business account.
| There is a docker image out there that will let you pump data
| to both services.
| chopsuei3 wrote:
| Oops, just posted the same thing, you beat me to it, good
| looking out =)
|
| Can you please share more details on that docker image setup?
| robotastic wrote:
| I have been using this Docker image on my Pi and it has
| been rock solid once you get it setup:
| https://github.com/mikenye/docker-piaware
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| Hah, you both beat me too it and I didn't realize until I
| posted the comment. Cheers
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Why dont you use motion sensing cameras? Could detect UFO
| gaetgu wrote:
| clouds, birds, leaves, etc.
| gillytech wrote:
| * Clouds can be (mostly) ignored by contrast, shape, color
| * Eliminate all trees from the viewport * Birds would be an
| added bonus to catch!
| ruforrel wrote:
| Ok, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times
| and maps out your exact house address?
| bambax wrote:
| It's somewhere south of Reagan DCA I think.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| _in grandpa voice_
|
| Back in my day, everyone's address was listed in the phone
| book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a
| service charge to keep yourself from being listed!
| AnssiH wrote:
| Here in Finland the companies operating the phone books and
| directory services still exist, and you can still search
| people's phone numbers and addresses online or by
| calling/texting directory services - just no printed books
| anymore.
|
| (and you can of course unlist yourself)
|
| I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g.
| U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| When I was a kid, nobody thought it was anything unusual to
| have a reporter from the local newspaper come out to your
| house and write an article with your home address and phone
| number.
|
| And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!
|
| I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red
| Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess
| players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my
| dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited
| Eugene for a chess tournament.
| prox wrote:
| In some places they even listed your job!
| dagurp wrote:
| In Iceland you can put whatever you want as your job
| title (or degree) so you have people calling themselves
| beefcakes, lion tamers, tetris players etc. It helps to
| see if you have the right person.
| capableweb wrote:
| In some countries, this is still true, with the addition
| of even your salary being public information.
| mastazi wrote:
| I didn't know about the salary, what country is that? I'm
| curious
| capableweb wrote:
| Norway is one such country
| (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239) but I think
| some others in the Nordics also does the same, not sure
| exactly which though and Google is not being very helpful
| this evening.
| Aqwis wrote:
| It's not exactly true that your _salary_ is public --
| what 's public is your taxable income, taxable wealth,
| total estimated tax, birth year and postal code. Various
| deductions apply to the income which makes it non-
| straightforward to deduce a person's actual income, and
| as for taxable wealth the minimums are high enough and
| deductions are substantial enough (especially if you own
| a home) that a lot of people with wealth much greater
| than zero will be listed with a taxable wealth as zero.
| kqr wrote:
| In Sweden, any document touched by the government is by
| default open to the public, as an anti-corruption, pro-
| democracy measure.
|
| Of course, your tax forms are documents touched by the
| government, in which your declared income is stated.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Given that the image is cropped and it's hard to tell which
| part of the frame the cropping is for, I think you can easily
| guess which airport this is nearby, but definitely not at the
| house or even street precision.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Scrambling the time a random amount each flyover could help?
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I don't think so. You only need 1 flight to locate him
| pretty accurately. If you do the thing you said, you'd need
| 2 flights along different axis to get a pretty good idea,
| with a larger amounts, you'd just improve accuracy a bit.
| Regardless, I think it doesn't matter. So what if they know
| where he lives, it's not like this sort of information is
| hard to come by anyway, and the risk profile of this is...
| not interesting, IMO.
| kqr wrote:
| Biasing by a constant amount might help.
|
| The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels
| itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly
| how many data points are needed to achieve a particular
| level of precision in the result.
| stefan_ wrote:
| What did that camera set you back (or did you get it some other
| way)? Their page only says "Call for pricing", which usually
| means it's going to be outside my hobby budget hah.
| robotastic wrote:
| I managed to get it for $500 on ebay... but I just checked
| and it looks like similar ones are around $1000 now, so I
| guess I got lucky. An Axis PTZ dome camera turned upside down
| works great too though and there are a lot of those available
| on Ebay.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Do you know any similar cameras for even cheaper (i.e.
| cheap Chinese stuff)?
| robotastic wrote:
| In theory it should work with any camera the supports
| ONVIF, which is a standard for security cameras...
| actually, as long as the camera has an API you could
| probably get it to work. Since precision and image
| quality are important though, it could end up being more
| trouble that it is worth. You may have better luck trying
| to find a used one.
| csours wrote:
| Awesome! I live north of Austin-Bergstrom and I quite often see
| planes on final approach. I've thought about doing this, and
| also trying to find a physical site for a telescope or
| telescopes to watch take-offs and landings.
| robotastic wrote:
| Let me know if you ever go down this rabbit-hole. Happy to
| give you pointers! You can get some pretty decent cameras off
| ebay for <$500. Since you are close you do not need much
| zoom.
| sklargh wrote:
| I live under KTEB's most common departure procedure and
| very much want to integrate this with my current ADS-B
| exchange setup. Super excited to give this a shot,
| hopefully won't freak out the neighbors too much.
| lifeplusplus wrote:
| would it be possible to pinpoint location of your house? Since
| we know the paths each of these planes have taken, public
| record, and although we dont know what time the photos were
| take we can still come up with range of locations vs time,
| where these angles would be possible.
|
| so find intersection of all these planes' paths, then using
| geometry figure out possible locations, then find their
| intersections..
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| FYI if you were able to set this up, it would be trivial for
| you to share your ADS-B feed with Flightradar24[1]. This would
| give you a free business plan[2] for as long as you share,
| which would get you access to that data.
| [1]https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own
| [2]https://www.flightradar24.com/premium
| mike_d wrote:
| Instead you should just feed ADSBExchange, which doesn't
| require premium business plans or other nonsense. They also
| do not censor the data and will show you planes that the
| owners don't want you to see.
|
| https://www.adsbexchange.com/
| globular-toast wrote:
| Back when I first discovered flightradar24 it seemed like
| every plane I was curious about came up on there. The
| curious ones are mostly military planes as they don't
| follow standard routes and schedules. Then more and more I
| noticed stuff not appearing. Later I discovered
| ADSBExchange and things seemed to be on there. But now,
| again, I regular hear military planes right over my house
| with not a thing shown on ADSBExchange. I don't think it's
| a coverage issue as I always see the regular boring cargo
| planes that come this way. Is it really "uncensored"?
| sklargh wrote:
| In sum, yes.
| mike_d wrote:
| Yes it is uncensored. Starting in 2019, aircraft
| conducting operations related to homeland security, law
| enforcement, national defense or intelligence can turn
| off ADSB out and communicate their location to the FAA
| out of band.
| yftsui wrote:
| Feed ADSBExchange does not have a good return, ADSBExchange
| have way less data available, they don't even have a free
| iOS client. A single Raspberry pi feeds both FlightAware
| and Flightradar24, they give you free business plan with
| apps with good user experience. From a normal user's point,
| don't see a good justification to do so.
| cedivad wrote:
| Hey I wanted to add myself to the list of people that always
| wanted to build this but never actually did. I wanted to build
| my own servo gimbal with an old telescope though, you choosing
| a 30x ptz makes it much more reasonable. Well done!
| anonu wrote:
| So you snap a picture of the sky based on the adsb data? Is
| there any delay you have to work with?
| simonw wrote:
| This is such a cool hack, thank you for building and sharing
| this.
| ytjohn wrote:
| This is absolutely incredible. I have been wanting to do this
| as well, but I was going to approach it from the computer
| vision approach (blueiris and deepstack ai). Or a dedicated
| camera and pythoncv. I never even thought of having cameras
| move to match flightaware data.
|
| A number of planes fly low and when I check flightaware,
| they're not on it. Or there's a plane that could be it, but
| it's flight path is heading East to West 30 miles North of me,
| while this plane came from the South heading North. Also,
| pretty much once a month or so, a pair of A10 Warthogs fly over
| or near our house. Last month, we had a real treat with 4 of
| them directly over the house, better than an air show.
|
| So I'd like to setup 4 cameras on my tower focused skyward and
| have them try to catch clips of planes. I'll be looking at your
| work to see if I can also match those with flightaware.
| robotastic wrote:
| Doing a vision only approach would be really cool. A lot of
| the interesting planes do not have their ADS-B transponder
| on. The two systems could actually work well together. My
| system ends up generating a really nice, labeled dataset. I
| put some initial scripts / notebooks together for building ML
| models that can classify the different types of aircraft.
| https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-
| model/script...
| jhugo wrote:
| Since 2020-01-01, ADS-B is a requirement in a lot of US
| airspace (FAR 91.225). Turning it off is allowed for govt /
| intelligence / law enforcement / military only. Many
| countries have similar requirements.
|
| People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder
| off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact
| these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service;
| this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.
| Naracion wrote:
| If turning ADSB off is only allowed for government /
| military / intelligence airplanes, would using a CV
| algorithm to capture these airplanes be against the law?
|
| Recently there was a post of Google satellite cameras
| capturing a B-2 Stealth Bomber showing up on Google Maps
| [1]. Would such planes be captured by a vision system
| only, and would that be of concern to the government that
| might be trying to keep it undetected?
|
| 1: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B001%2718.5%22
| N+93%C...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Not a pilot, but played with ADS-B tracking several years
| ago, and my impression was below something like 4-5000'
| the transponder wasn't required to transmit location.
| This meant that surveillance aircraft (usually single
| engine propeller craft and helicopters) didn't send GPS,
| only the fact that it was in the air.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| In fact, ADS-B E has an option to filter only aircraft
| not shown on other sites :)
| punnerud wrote:
| You could use the ADS-B data for training your vision
| solution
| mod wrote:
| I also have military planes flying over frequently. I live in
| the Ozarks, and they seem to enjoy flying quite low through
| the valleys.
|
| I'm sure some people don't like the noise, but I love seeing
| the planes so close.
| echelon wrote:
| You're the kind of hacker I would love to work with some day.
|
| This is seriously one of the most fun and inventive projects
| I've seen. Such ingenuity at every stage of this pipeline. I
| didn't even realize they made cameras like this.
|
| Bravo! Please keep it up!
| coding123 wrote:
| since it got hugged to death by HN can you post some pics?
| robotastic wrote:
| I just upgraded the App Service plan I was using... It should
| be back now for a bit.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| It's back for me now as of 6:48 PM EST
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Very cool. To add some charm to it, set the title to UFO for
| the unidentified ones :)
| cmurf wrote:
| Anyone know what these bank trustee planes are all about?
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| ct0 wrote:
| https://www.bankofutah.com/corporate-trust/trust/aircraft-ow...
| 8bitben wrote:
| Many airlines have arrangements where banks purchase the planes
| outright then lease them back in a long-term deal. Helps with
| airlines finances.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Isn't the operator of a flight what shows up in e.g.
| Flightradar and also what you'd typically be most interested
| in, rather than the owner of the aircraft?
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30041431
| [deleted]
| yeldarb wrote:
| Any interest in sharing the plane dataset you used to train Azure
| Custom Vision with others? Happy to host it on Roboflow Universe
| along with an API to a trained model others can hit to detect
| planes in images.
|
| We've got one detecting planes on the ground but not yet in the
| air! https://universe.roboflow.com/gdit/aerial-airport
| phkahler wrote:
| Did they ever indicate using a model like that? Just plug in an
| ADS-B receiver and they'll broadcast their tail number and
| location to you. Everything else can be looked up.
| yeldarb wrote:
| Yeah the crop is done after uploading a photo taken towards
| the general direction of the plane:
|
| > The Function uses a model trained in Azure Custom Vision to
| detect if there is an airplane in the photo and where it is
| robotastic wrote:
| Definitely - Let me build a little better dataset. I need to
| augment a bit because it was false detecting on some of the
| contrails.
|
| I built some scripts to also start building a model that can
| classify the different aircraft models. One of the interesting
| things with this, is that you get really accurate labels...
| probably better than what a human could do for images of this
| size.
|
| https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| As someone living directly below a flight path, I want one of two
| things: to make enough money to move out, or lobby the FAA to
| spread the pain more widely. At some point, the so-called NextGen
| technology enabled the FAA to channel all air traffic along a
| hyper narrow corridor -- one that's unfortunately right over my
| street.
| tomcat27 wrote:
| so coooool :)
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| This is really neat. I've thought about doing something similar,
| but feared that this is enough information to deduce where one
| lives. Kudos to the author for not only making this, but also
| publishing it
| ryandrake wrote:
| You're not wrong. In 2017, 4chan trolls (in)famously deduced
| the location of (and defaced) Shia Labeouf's "HWNDU" flag
| art/protest project in 37 hours [1] from only a webcam pointed
| at the sky. Never underestimate the capabilities of bored
| people on the Internet with an ax to grind.
|
| 1: https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-
| first-...
| solarkraft wrote:
| Arguably more entertaining telling of the story by the
| Internet Historian: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vw9zyxm860Q
| gnabgib wrote:
| Feels like the website-about page: http://skybot.cam/about is a
| much better link than a tweet.. loaded with details. For example:
| - Most planes are passing at over 30,000' - It's using a
| Costar RISE 4260 camera /w built in heater - It leverages
| SkyScan by IQT labs[0] - It leverages Azure custom vision
| API[1]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan [1]:
| https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
| metadat wrote:
| I wonder what the monthly Azure bill is.
|
| Also wondering what the stack would look like for a self-hosted
| version with equivalent or better functionality!
| robotastic wrote:
| You could get away with a pretty cheap hosting bill, I think
| a $10 VPC would be more than enough. My current Azure
| forecast is around $65, but that is for a couple other things
| too. Half the reason I went big with the different features
| is that I just started at Microsoft and wanted to learn the
| different things... plus you get a $150 monthly credit.
|
| All of the capture stuff just runs on a Raspberry Pi.
| starik36 wrote:
| I believe under 500 transaction a month its free.
| Graffur wrote:
| Unfortunately no HTTPS on the website
| anaganisk wrote:
| http://n-gate.com/software/2017/
| Graffur wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is a joke/meme but that is also
| insecure.
| anaganisk wrote:
| It neither a joke nor a meme, its a reality check for
| unnecessary https.
| avree wrote:
| Why would a website who's only purpose is delivering blurry
| pictures need HTTPS?
| Graffur wrote:
| To securely deliver the intended content.
| 8192kjshad09- wrote:
| Preventing ISPs and other bad actors from using it to
| deliver ads/malware?
| anaganisk wrote:
| Now thats a user problem, if the users ISP is shit. There
| was internet before Lets Encrypt you know?
| [deleted]
| pidgin123 wrote:
| Amazing idea. I always wanted to make something like ths. We live
| about 3 miles (vector distance) from a local airport and this
| airport is middle of a 200 year old town, used pretty much for
| teaching how to fly! In summers, when we sit outside, it has
| rather become a big nuisance as there's a plane that creates
| sound pollution. I meant to gather facts as to how many "learn to
| fly" planes fly over the residential areas with inherent risk
| associated and many residents are also worried about the same.
|
| Are you able to open source this setup and guide us thru some of
| the details? Your idea/implementation would actually help change
| the world into a better place.
| zokier wrote:
| One neat thing that could be made with these individual pics is
| to composite them to this sort of neat picture
| https://i.imgur.com/6czv1gU.jpg
| robotastic wrote:
| Oh! that is a great idea. I am already tracking the camera's
| azimuth and elevation so I could probably composite everything
| to togther.
| ejj28 wrote:
| This is super cool, I've had the idea to do the same thing for a
| while now, but never bothered to try. Really cool to see it
| realized and in action!
| EchoReflection wrote:
| Too bad that (I assume) "Skynet" is already copyrighted.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| That's incredible, what a great idea! I read some instructable a
| long time ago, but forgot to bookmark it, where someone was using
| an ADS-B receiver and raspberry pi to display a faux radar screen
| image of azimuth and altitude of planes nearby.
|
| This approach is even better!
| Program_Install wrote:
| This is fantastic, always something majestic and curious about
| planes. How they fly and where they are going. Kudos!
| ezod wrote:
| A year ago today I launched something similar, but for Great
| Lakes boats passing my house on the Detroit River (uses AIS
| rather than ADS-B, and passively tracks the boat crossing the
| fixed camera rather than pointing the camera):
|
| https://twitter.com/detroitships
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| really cool!
| robotastic wrote:
| Thats amazing! If I lived anywhere near the water I would want
| to try and set something like this up.
| newsclues wrote:
| If you add a laser pointer, you effectively built a low cost anti
| aircraft weapon. Very cool
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| That's just stupid and dangerous.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| If you add a laser pointer you'll effectively get yourself
| arrested within a few hours.
|
| Aircraft get laserd relatively often and it's dangerous to the
| pilots. We report it to air traffic control with an estimated
| location, they then coordinate with the police.
|
| Common practice is to turn off exterior lights when lasered,
| because it's just bored people with a laser pointer and they
| can't aim when the plane has no lights on. But if you link it
| to ADS-B that would require switching off the transponder which
| will cause issues for ATC.
| newsclues wrote:
| Get arrested?
|
| I was thinking it would be good for rebels in Africa or the
| Middle East who get attacked by nation state actors.
|
| This is a low cost anti air deterrent and monitoring system,
| that can operate remotely, and autonomously.
|
| Don't poor people have the right to not be bombed?
| sgt wrote:
| Often? Hopefully it's just kids with no concept of the
| dangers involved. I don't understand why an adult would do
| such a thing.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The FAA publishes the number of reported incidents:
| https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/lasers/laws
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I am not trying to be negative about what seems like Ana amazing
| project but I am genuinely curious: why? Is it the cool factor of
| being able to identify aircraft out of the sky with a camera?
| Being able to show the photos to someone (who?)? Asserting your
| rights to capture this data? Why would someone want to do this?
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The way you wanted to phrase that question is, "Cool! Was there
| any other reason you wanted to build this beyond the technical
| challenge of it?" Otherwise it sounds like you're saying, "You
| need to get laid more, bro."
|
| This question is also handy at hackathons. Sometimes you get an
| answer like, "nope", other times you get anti-government
| screeds, sometimes dreams of saving the world once they've
| scaled up.
|
| Personally, I find it better not to ask and to just enjoy the
| hack.
| sgt wrote:
| I think a guy capable of building an automatic plane spotting
| system gets laid. I mean.. if not, what's wrong with the
| world?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| The reason I asked is because I have a unique opportunity to
| do the same where I live but I want to know if there is any
| utility in it other than the build itself and the learning
| experience, and if so, what it is. This reminds me of the
| thing that takes photos of the ISS every time it flies
| overhead, except I get no understanding of why someone
| wouldn't just use the many many high resolution photos of it
| from much more up close or the publicly available data. But
| let's say that it turned out that every time it passes by you
| could use your decoder ring to get another piece of a neat
| message then I would get into it for my kids' sake.
| dvtrn wrote:
| " Is it the cool factor of being able to identify aircraft out
| of the sky with a camera?"
|
| Yeah, pretty much. But for short we just call it
| "planespotting" in the hobby community ;)
| amohajerani wrote:
| What is the utility of the project? Any use cases?
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| Fun, if you can believe it.
| kurosawa wrote:
| Also, what if many folks set up the same so that we have full
| crowdsourced surveillance of aircrafts over various regions,
| how could this info be used i wonder?
| version_five wrote:
| Looking at the planes that fly over your house? Seriously, I am
| interested in this and do it already "manually" when I can.
| What more reason do you need?
| robotastic wrote:
| I am not sure if it is actually useful... but if folks have
| ideas, I would love to hear them! I worked on it mostly to see
| if it could be done.
| gabea wrote:
| +1 to this question. I am interested to learn about use cases
| that go beyond satiating one's own desire to identify the
| plane.
| mro_name wrote:
| It's a hell lot of them. Is this typical?
| Jabbles wrote:
| I think someone who doesn't have many planes flying overhead is
| less likely to build such a system.
| version_five wrote:
| From my experience you are either under a flight lane and a lot
| of planes fly over, or none do. There may be some places
| further north where they are more spread out, but for example I
| used to live just south of the approach to one of the runways
| at my city's airport (maybe 10 miles away so the planes were
| not super low but were already lined up with the runway) and we
| saw a constant stream of them go by. I really enjoyed it to,
| there were lots i could identify readily and sometimes an
| obscure one that I'd jump on flightaware to see what it was. I
| think this is a cool project and wish I had something similar.
|
| Edit: related, I regularly commuted by plane between two
| cities, and my parents live out in the country part way between
| the two. I could regularly see their house out the window of my
| plane, because by chance one of the flight lanes was just north
| of them. So they would have have a lot of traffic going
| overhead, despite being nowhere near an airport. They also have
| less frequent planes go by on great circle routes to europe,
| which is probably what you're imagining thinking about seeing
| planes infrequently.
| waynecochran wrote:
| My favorite was "Meatball Martini Airlines LLC." I'm going guess
| an Italian owns that.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I did some digging to try to find out. I found the owner's
| (well, registrant's) house, and it was reasonably average for
| someone flying their own private jet.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Very cool. Im quite surprised where I live the number of times
| the house is shadowed by a passing plane. Once a month at least.
| eggy wrote:
| A thought experiment leapt to mind on how one would triangulate
| (septangulate!) your location based on heading, time, flight
| information, and their intersections. I suppose you could get
| within a 100 meters? Very cool photos! When I lived in Macau a
| while back, I used to listen to the Hong Kong Airport tower on my
| SDR and try to link it to flight data, but at the time (2011/2012
| or so)my connection and the data was not that great, but I could
| see and hear who was taking off and landing.
| robotastic wrote:
| Totally - I think you could work back where the camera is
| based. I have the bearing / azimuth of the camera for each
| photo, so you could look up where each plane was at that
| timestamp and then project backwards.
|
| I bet you had much better aircraft flying out of Hong Kong!!
| eggy wrote:
| I was only listening, but it was fun!
|
| I listened to the plane landing that my older children were
| on when coming to visit me.
|
| What amazes me about your project is to put focus on things
| we take for granted going over our heads all the time.
| RobotCaleb wrote:
| About 5 years ago I started trying to build this exact thing. I
| wrote some code, printed some gears and attached them to servos,
| assembled some hall effect sensors onto the whole thing, and then
| stopped. I had a camera that I could command to an azimuth and an
| elevation. I think it was a PlayStation3 pseye camera. It
| certainly would not have been able to zoom in to the point that
| this one seems to be able to. I was going to use my RTL SDR to
| listen to the ADSB and mount the whole thing on my roof under a
| clear plastic dome.
| fooker wrote:
| >printed some gears.
|
| Would it be easier to get an astronomy mount and control it
| programmatically?
| RobotCaleb wrote:
| Easiest today would be to use the project this project uses.
| I don't think it existed at the time I was trying, though.
| And, yes, that would be easier, but not in the vein of "doing
| it myself" that I was aiming for. :D
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've been thinking about building a laser graphics system to
| write on clouds on nights when there are stratus clouds.
|
| I'm worried about lasing an airplane (I am not too close to the
| airport but not that far either) and was thinking about hooking
| up an ADS-B receiver to tell the system to keep the beam away
| from airplanes, even if they are on the other side of the cloud
| deck.
|
| A system like that, funny enough, is supposed to get approval
| from the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) because the FDA
| regulates lasers. If aircraft are involved the FDA asks the FAA
| what they think about it. I'd hope that they think that
| protective system would be good enough.
| tjohns wrote:
| Keep in mind that not all aircraft are required to transmit an
| ADS-B signal.
|
| Not to say it couldn't be done, given the right approvals.
| You'd possibly be asked to publish a NOTAM to tell aircraft to
| stay away. The FAA has a publication on this very topic:
|
| https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
| arch_rust wrote:
| Cool ADS-B projects are awesome! If anyone is interested in one
| written in rust, see https://github.com/rsadsb/adsb_deku
| punnerud wrote:
| Useful idea for usage: Point a WiFi-dish/antenna towards the
| plane and gather WiFi & Bluetooth MAC addresses for all the
| passengers. Now you can make statistics about the number of
| passengers, how long /often they travel ++ good information if
| you want to trade stocks in airplane companies.
|
| You can direct the antenna precisely because you have the image
| recognition in addition to GPS.
| Tepix wrote:
| MAC address randomization makes this harder.
| frontman1988 wrote:
| It's impossible given how fast planes fly
| upofadown wrote:
| Planes don't fly _that_ fast. The body of the aircraft
| would tend to shield the signals though.
| punnerud wrote:
| You can also provide the plane with WiFi access this way. A
| passenger can easily activate WiFi in combination with Airplane
| Mode on most phones (including iPhone)
| gillytech wrote:
| That's the strangest looking Airbus I have ever seen...
| https://skybotstore.blob.core.windows.net/plane/a71efa_193_5...
| robotastic wrote:
| ha! yea.... The camera itself doesn't know when a building gets
| in the way. I have some general stop angles, but it is not
| perfect. There is some ML in there to get rid of photos like
| this... but I guess the model things that air conditioners look
| like airplanes.
| neonate wrote:
| Link to the site: http://skybot.cam/
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
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