Birbla

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Hacker News

As I live on a widely used flight path, I also made one a while ago using a cheap ESP32 ($12) XiaoZhi AI display .

I made it multi-purpose by showing air traffic when a flight enters the selected airspace and when there's no new traffic, it defaults to showing my Claude usage and reset duration. It works with ESPHome and also has Home Assistant Voice Assistant as I wanted to experiment with fully local HA Assist.

by minute_man

Looks pretty cool, though kinda "cheating" by pulling from adsb.fi - though I think you'd need something a lot more powerful than an ESP32 to receive and decode ADS-B ;)

by amatecha

ADS-B is not radar, despite ATC calling these sorts of things “secondary radar”.

by sneak

Perhaps I didn’t read it thoroughly enough but it seems that lat/long of the “radar” are expected to be entered by user, I think using wifi positioning could be of great assist and could be done from mcu itself without involving web portal, though maybe portal already does it (didn’t get to see it)

by boguscoder

radar *display*

making esp32-based radar emitter would've been cool, tho

by NooneAtAll3

I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.

I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.

However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.

It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.

Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).

by scarecrowbob

Well, a radar-like display, then. But not a radar.

by freitasm

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  • Hacker News
  • As I live on a widely used flight path, I also made one a while ago using a cheap ESP32 ($12) XiaoZhi AI display .

    I made it multi-purpose by showing air traffic when a flight enters the selected airspace and when there's no new traffic, it defaults to showing my Claude usage and reset duration. It works with ESPHome and also has Home Assistant Voice Assistant as I wanted to experiment with fully local HA Assist.

    by minute_man
  • Looks pretty cool, though kinda "cheating" by pulling from adsb.fi - though I think you'd need something a lot more powerful than an ESP32 to receive and decode ADS-B ;)
    by amatecha
  • ADS-B is not radar, despite ATC calling these sorts of things “secondary radar”.
    by sneak
  • Perhaps I didn’t read it thoroughly enough but it seems that lat/long of the “radar” are expected to be entered by user, I think using wifi positioning could be of great assist and could be done from mcu itself without involving web portal, though maybe portal already does it (didn’t get to see it)
    by boguscoder
  • radar *display*

    making esp32-based radar emitter would've been cool, tho

    by NooneAtAll3
  • I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.

    I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.

    However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.

    It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.

    Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).

    by scarecrowbob
  • Well, a radar-like display, then. But not a radar.
    by freitasm
  • Looks like several of these have come up in the past months, with the last one being a real product (that was on pre-order)

    - https://makerworld.com/models/2872376-esp32-plane-radar-live... (referenced by the linked article)

    - https://github.com/AnthonySturdy/micro-radar

    - https://www.gadgies.co.uk/shop/p/product-3-szb2y-gzh2r-tzhkx...

    Personally, I really like them. It's a nice gadget. :)

    by MrGilbert