[HN Gopher] An LED panel that shows the aviation around you
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An LED panel that shows the aviation around you
Author : yzydserd
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-11-27 07:22 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Nice job on this. I love a good builder project and the ESP32 is
| a great platform for these.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| 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.
| donclark wrote:
| 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?
| RankingMember wrote:
| Are you looking for a log of planes that have overflown your
| location or something else? You can see historical info via the
| history function on https://globe.airplanes.live/
| donclark wrote:
| That is a great live service. Thank you for sharing. We live
| near an airport/military and often hear loud or low flying
| aircraft and wonder exactly what it was. My question is if
| there is a log for my area that I could search by approximate
| date/time to try to identify the aircraft.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I would venture that once you had this reference to look
| up, you will be able to start identifying the planes by
| sound alone. Lots of grease monkeys can ID a car by its
| sound. Some are more obvious than others. I can easily tell
| when the dual rotor Chinook flies over compared to other
| helicopters.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Yep! The interface icons are a little cryptic, but if you
| click the little icon in the upper right that looks like a
| play button surrounded by a reversing arrow, that will
| bring up an interface at the bottom to specify the date and
| time you want to see the history for. Click the
| "pause/unpause" button and it'll play back the activity at
| the speed you set so you can see all the planes that
| overflew at that time.
| RankingMember wrote:
| 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.
| filtinious wrote:
| 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...)
| esseph wrote:
| For much of a year I slept at the end of a runway in a combat
| zone in Iraq and used to hear all the jets take off with full
| afterburner.
|
| I got to the point I just slept through it.
| danudey wrote:
| When I was visiting Jerusalem in 2001 I got used to the sound
| of what was apparently helicopter gunships firing on... I
| dunno, something, off in the distance.
|
| Definitely not the same as sleeping under an F16 or whatever,
| but it's amazing what we can get used to.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Nothing like the smell of murder and oppression in the
| morning!
| sokoloff wrote:
| For this situation, it's not clear that a live display is more
| helpful than a replay of ADS-B data that you could explore
| later.
|
| Something like:
| https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2025-12-01-16:38&lat=...
| filtinious wrote:
| Thanks, that is helpful. I can see from it there's lots of
| plane traffic flying just south of the river, from East to
| West, into Heathrow airport, from 5am onwards.
| nocoiner wrote:
| 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.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| There's a flight path directly over my house. I'm going to see if
| my wife would be on board for this.
| dddw wrote:
| Ask nicely, but decidedly
| vs4vijay wrote:
| I vibe coded something similar as PWA WebApp -
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/vs4vijay/skywatch
| CPLX wrote:
| 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.
| cdfuller wrote:
| I've seen this done a few different times. FlightRadar24 has a
| 24/7 livestream in Las Vegas that tracks and annotates them.
|
| https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/inside-flightradar24/live...
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