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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 regi
by robotastic 5y ago
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.
- b33j0r 5y agoI 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 5y agoI should clarify that I’m mostly guessing on your bill of materials. There are only a few obvious choices for this project.
- robotastic 5y agoI posted a bit more on what I am using on the About page: http://skybot.cam/about 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 5y ago> 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 5y agoI’m doing tensorflow on an nvidia jetson. Indeed, slowly. Thanks for sharing those details on your project!
- busheezy 5y agoIf 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 5y agoOops, 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 5y agoI 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 https://github.com/mikenye/docker-piaware
- FearlessNebula 5y agoHah, you both beat me too it and I didn't realize until I posted the comment. Cheers
- csours 5y agoAwesome! 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 5y agoLet 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 5y agoI 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.
- ytjohn 5y agoThis 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 5y agoDoing 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/scripts https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model/script...
- jhugo 5y agoSince 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.
- aqfamnzc 5y agoIn fact, ADS-B E has an option to filter only aircraft not shown on other sites :)
- 5y ago
- zyang 5y agoAre you filtering out military planes?
- jhugo 5y agoThere'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 5y agoAccording 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-military-aircraft-turn-ads-b-transmissions-off/ https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/07/23/new-rule-allows-mil...
- jhugo 5y agoCorrect, 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.
- Lammy 5y agoPhantom 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 5y agoYes, 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 5y agoIf 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://flightaware.com/commercial/premium/#subscriptions https://blog.flightaware.com/201802-free-benefits-with-your-enterprise-account https://blog.flightaware.com/201802-free-benefits-with-your-...
- robotastic 5y agooh 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 5y agoUnfortunately 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 https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db
- stefan_ 5y agoWhat 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoDo you know any similar cameras for even cheaper (i.e. cheap Chinese stuff)?
- robotastic 5y agoIn 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.
- simonw 5y agoThis is such a cool hack, thank you for building and sharing this.
- coding123 5y agosince it got hugged to death by HN can you post some pics?
- robotastic 5y agoI just upgraded the App Service plan I was using... It should be back now for a bit.
- FearlessNebula 5y agoIt's back for me now as of 6:48 PM EST
- jcims 5y agoYour 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 5y agoThat 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 5y agoI'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 5°/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 1° 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 5y agoThat 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 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.
- FearlessNebula 5y agoFYI 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 https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own [2]https://www.flightradar24.com/premium https://www.flightradar24.com/premium
- mike_d 5y agoInstead 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/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/
- globular-toast 5y agoBack 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"?
- yftsui 5y agoFeed 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.
- johnflan 5y agoVery cool, how do you get the camera to point to the right place?
- sydthrowaway 5y agoWhy dont you use motion sensing cameras? Could detect UFO
- aimor 5y agoWhat would you have to change to capture helicopters too?
- robotastic 5y agoIt 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.
- robofanatic 5y agoCool
- echelon 5y agoYou'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!
- anonu 5y agoSo you snap a picture of the sky based on the adsb data? Is there any delay you have to work with?
- ruforrel 5y agoOk, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times and maps out your exact house address?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoin 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!
- prox 5y agoIn some places they even listed your job!
- capableweb 5y agoIn some countries, this is still true, with the addition of even your salary being public information.
- mastazi 5y agoI didn't know about the salary, what country is that? I'm curious
- capableweb 5y agoNorway is one such country (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 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 5y agoIt'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.
- lifeplusplus 5y agowould 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..
- andreygrehov 5y agoVery cool. To add some charm to it, set the title to UFO for the unidentified ones :)
- cedivad 5y agoHey 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!
- mormegil 5y agoFor 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 5y agoDo 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
- Istribitel 5y agoDid you present this at PyMNtos some time back? I love this project. It's fun to see it here!