12 ms·

My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

1304 points by jakey_bakey 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
I thought about building a laser system to write on overcast skies at night and realized it would have to have something like this so it doesn’t pass any aircraft.
int32 3y ago
Awesome, thank you for making this app! My 2yo is obsessed with planes too and we spent a good chunk of our day looking up the sky scanning for planes :) We tried the Flightradar24 app too but it is way to distracting for him... can't wait to show him tomorrow!
1-more 3y ago
Related "An app can be a home cooked meal" on cloning the defunct social network app Tapstack for just his family's usage https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's a lovely article, bookmarked! Agree, I'd have been happy with zero downloads because the process was rewarding itself. Going viral also not bad though.
  - 1-more 3y ago
    for sure! Congrats on your big W!
bunabhucan 3y ago
>the crew spots you with a cute plane-obsessed toddler, they invite you in to check out the cockpit. Matching NASA orange jumpsuits are the passport into every cockpit. The crew gets way more excited than the kids. Also makes them super easy to find in the airport.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's genius, so I just need myself or my wife to get into NASA. Do they need many iOS devs in space?
jaxelr 3y ago
My son loves this app and he’s 7. Thanks! A small gripe, I’m unsure whats the api refresh rate and my kid continues closing and opening the app and then it sporadically gets time outs on the API. That being said, I much appreciate taking the time to release it and blog about it.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's awesome, glad he liked it! Very fair - the OpenSky API has no SLO, so it will sporadically fail to reload. I'm working on better retry logic in V2, and potentially the ability to login with your own OpenSky account (http basic auth)
magicmicah85 3y ago
I love the design but go one step further - forget the API and get an SDR that is tuned to ADB frequencies at 1090 Mhz and gather the data yourself. Then she'll have a true radar. Edit: fair point on what a radar is, today I re-remembered :)
- RachelF 3y ago
  Nice app and writeup - but she won't have a radar - she'll have an app that displays the positions of airplanes. A true radar needs to transmit and receive. The SDR is still just listening to the telemetry from the plane, which they transmit all the time for this ADS mode.
  - empyrrhicist 3y ago
    You can have passive radar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar But yes, it needs to be doing more than receiving telemetry to qualify, and there has to be something transmitting.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    TIL what a radar is :)
- TheSwordsman 3y ago
  Disregarding the other replies for a moment where they rightfully call out that it wouldn't be radar, wouldn't they still need a publicly available API for this data if they wanted to access it outside of their house (e.g., when at the park)? So at that point, why add the additional complexity if there's already someone sharing ADS-B data to OpenSky for your area?
  - magicmicah85 3y ago
    Why add the complexity? Cause you can. You can also submit the data to contribute while at the same time receiving and displaying it in their webpage.
  - 3y ago
StephenAmar 3y ago
There's a really cool setup at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vZjWb5n6E&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vZjWb5n6E&t=1s My son can spend hours just waiting for planes landing in SFO.
xrd 3y ago
So many people say: "Don't take young kids abroad, they won't really remember those travels." BS. I took my son to Brazil, it was great, we got on a $1 cab ride, got on a pirate ship, endless alpine slide after the aerial tram, and went to the Botanical Garden in Rio. (He did say: "that day was totally boring, we didn't do anything!", but I know it was the greatest day of his life, and I can point out all those things to him and he'll not demur). Later, I took my three kids to Barcelona and Greece. They don't remember the time we took a bus from Athens to the beach and they were rolling around on the dirty floor of a bus, but they do remember the Abba-themed wedding. Those experiences matter.
- QkPrsMizkYvt 3y ago
  Very off topic, but I +1 this. I am half and half and as a baby and young kid we went to one spot every summary. To this day I remember these travels. They matter a lot indeed.
  - xrd 3y ago
    That's great to hear. I think my kids recall the experiences, but you do, and you were a kid doing that. In twenty years I hope to hear the same things from my kids.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I mean, I’m not half, and I never went further than +/- 200 km from my hometown until I was 23 years old, but we did go on vacation somewhere every year. I _still_ remember all that travel too. It was different enough to make a lasting impression. 99% of our life is spent in the same 2 sqkm area, so it’s not super surprising that everything else is different.
- Elora 3y ago
  I don't think it's strictly the experience in a memory facsimile, "let me quiz the kids" format that matters. There are a mind boggling number of new and unique data points and methods of delivery kids are exposed to during travel which is really healthy for a developing human mind to have as part of its growth regimen. Travel is one of the last things I will cut if times get tough for our family, before essentials such as food and shelter.
tgtweak 3y ago
Advice for a wholesome activity with your daughter: Bring her to the closest road/parking lot/park at the inbound end of your closest international airport runway (Typically this changes based on wind direction). Park and watch the planes come in and land. She can use her "radar" to see which planes are coming in (we used flightradar24). My kids were FLOORED how close the planes get to the ground on approach - especially the bigger jetliners. Easily entertained for hours and had to bargain with them to leave because they wanted to see if the next plane was bigger/closer than the last.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  Bring some earmuffs.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  When I was in high school, there was a gravel lot just outside of the airport perimeter fencing at the end of one of the runways. When the wind was going the right direction so that the airplanes were taking off over that lot, it was the place to park and make out.
- ridgeguy 3y ago
  And if you're in the D.C. area, Gravely Point is the place for this. Feels like you can count the rivets for planes on either departure or landing.
  - neilv 3y ago
    For Logan airport in Boston, Revere Beach is one place with a pretty good view of airliners, and is short walk from the Blue Line. You can also see a bunch of other places on a map that line up with runways: South Boston (including Castle Island), East Boston, and a bit further from Logan is the harborwalk around Long Wharf and the aquarium. (The aquarium might also be interesting to kids. There's some free viewing windows for a little of it, while walking past, to maybe gauge interest before paying admission. And there's various tourist things in that area, including various harbor boat rides.) A camera/cameraphone with >1x lens will get them a closer look at planes. Or binoculars/monocular if you want to reduce screen time, or to encourage appreciating it in the moment rather than trying to capture it. (What kind of hearing protection works for kids?)
Full_Clark 3y ago
Nice work and nice writeup. It's interesting to me how strongly the design of original radar displays anchors the project. Your toddler might never interact with a real CRT, much less an ASR-9 with a PPI display. But you've gone to great lengths to simulate one for her. Partly because of your affinity for skeumorphism, as you said, but it may also be because the OG radar display is a fantastic distillation of "Is there something in the sky and where is it relative to me?" All the UIs we have for sky-watching now have moved away from that in favor of contextual data or linking out to other services (or creating space to display ads). In the process of presenting all that additional information, they've lost the ability to easily answer that particular question.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Really appreciate the feedback :) I think I was very well served by having a very pure motive: What direction should I look to find a plane, and worked up from there.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  I like your comment — it points out that our RADAR displays were a both a product of the technology that was used to generate them (the sweep) but also that it was a deliberate way to make clear what it was you were observing (target distance was represented by distance from center, target bearing by angle around the circle). To your point though, perhaps emulating the sweep was the questionable design decision — the bright colors, map-less background not controversial at all since they help focus on the intent of the display. I did notice that as I turn with the phone, the compass-tracking feature broke the illusion of the sweep. :-)
  - seanc 3y ago
    Now I have a funny vision in my head of a WWII radio tech standing in a field, wearing an absurdly large RADAR rig, with a big sweeping antenna protruding from a backpack and a massive screen on his chest, turning this way and that, all confused by how the sweep doesn't look quite right...
icemanind 3y ago
This is awesome! Now I'd like to see an Android version or better yet, a port to something like React-Native, so it can work on any device, iOS or Android!
0x38B 3y ago
Jacob, what a cool project! It was fun to read, which speaks to your writing skills. On my iPhone SE (2020) the scan-line effect is distractingly low res (1), perhaps because of my lower screen resolution? 1: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/RPReplay_Final1701128035.mov https://nexus.armylane.com/files/RPReplay_Final1701128035.mo...
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Hey, thank you for the bug report! I think I know the culprit, my Shader which is applying the CRT effect shouldn't scale the scanlines with screen size, they should be constant sized - I noticed the same issue when you go to the app switcher.
harshreality 3y ago
Now you get to explain to her in a few years how different ADS-B-based web data (or locally received ADS-B, even) is from genuine RAdio-Detection-And-Ranging (either the old school rotating type or modern fancy PESA/AESA ones). And she'll forever remind you how your app [name] is a lie.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  What a fitting username!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ginkgotree 3y ago
As a Pilot, this is amazing. Bravo!
alberth 3y ago
Love the simplicity. > ”A Learjet at 40,000 feet shows up the same as an AirBus that just took off at London City Airport, however it’s a lot easier to spot the jumbo jet in the real sky.” When I use FlightRadar24, I actually see different icons for jumbo jets vs Learjets vs prop planes - so they do not show up the same for me. Maybe the author means altitude is not distinguished per this quote: > ”I added some simple log scaling to the map annotations using the altitude of the flight so higher up aircraft appear larger on-screen.” After downloading the app, planes high in the sky overlap/hide planes lower to the ground. I wonder if color coding the planes would have been better than using different size planes to indicate altitude. Eg brown/green planes mean close to the ground, and blue planes mean high in the sky. Then have all planes the same size, and use different plane icon shapes for distinguishing commercial jet vs private jet vs prop
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  I have this addressed in V2: The transponder gives an approximate size class for the aircraft, so I'll be able to scale them better if I use this
jakedahn 3y ago
Thank you for making this! I have a 1.5yo that’s obsessed with pointing out planes in the sky. Now we can go plane watching together!
ghiculescu 3y ago
My toddler has a similar back story (flight hype -> loves planes). This inspired me to finally upgrade my iOS.
ingen0s 3y ago
Very cool and inspirational!
khieu123 3y ago
[flagged]
zoom6628 3y ago
Just wanted to say what a wonderfully uplifting comment thread here in HN all launched by a heartwarming article. Such a pleasure to read of the kids delight, people's travels and fun as kids and with their own children. + a billion!!
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you :D It's quite nice the level of positivity, versus some of my other deep technical write-ups which might have a small inaccuracy Toys are harder to mess up!
gregorvand 3y ago
Funny, I just re-watched the Gener8 DD pitch yesterday coincidentally and checked out where you guys were at since then. Great write up! Just need to upgrade my iPad OS to give it a spin
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's awesome! Any feedback on the apps are welcome
_kush 3y ago
This is brilliant - thanks for sharing the story. This is one of those ideas that, on the surface, looks really hard to build but your breakdown made it look super easy. Very inspiring :)
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you :) It was probably my easiest ever article to write, since I was simply coding each evening and adding a few cliffnotes, screenshots, and snippets as I went. When it came to writing, it was just filling in the blanks :)
s4i 3y ago
> But, in order to make sure she could handle the 3-hour flight, my wife and I made sure to hype up the airplane journey. So much so, that my toddler was shocked when we had to get into a cab for the airport — she expected to walk straight from our house onto a plane. This is absolutely adorable, hilarious and understandable at the same time.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Haha yeah, I think by the journey back she started to get the hang of it
- seanc 3y ago
  Fun fact, there's a swanky gated community in Florida where you can do just that: https://www.architecturendesign.net/john-travoltas-house-is-a-functional-airport-with-2-runways-for-his-private-planes/ https://www.architecturendesign.net/john-travoltas-house-is-...
  - pc86 3y ago
    Fly-in communities are actually pretty common as far as aviation stuff goes. There are probably several hundred in the US.
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      But most of them have runways made for small general aviation bugsmashers, not 707s.
    - JTbane 3y ago
      While that sounds like a great concept I'd be worried about the constant lawnmower tier noise that GA planes make over my home.
      - pc86 3y ago
        Then you probably shouldn't buy a house where the biggest selling point is that it's directly connected to a runway.
cyanfrog 3y ago
The apps doesn't work for me. Connection is timing out.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Sorry about that - the free API has no SLO, so sometimes you need to check back later on to get it working! V2 will allow you to use HTTP basic auth and your own OpenSky account
ahoka 3y ago
I was hoping he was actually building a radar, but this is not one. Still nice though.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Apologies about that. I hope it doesn't quite fall into clickbait territory My friend in NSO group is working on hacking the iPhone to pick up transponder signals, watch this space
boomskats 3y ago
Interesting how the OpenSky API shows all of the private jets at Farnborough, whereas the flightradar24 UI hides them.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's a great point! I reckon FlightRadar might have a side hustle of hush money :)
dozaa 3y ago
The fade in-out solution was genius! Knowing myself I would've definitely over-complicated it and spent ages writing spaghetti.
shultays 3y ago
"I wanted to make a radar app and here is my toddler for cuteness points"
WentFullRetard 3y ago
[dead]
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Was part of a project to put a similar display in the cockpit. Using transponder data which includes GPS location, you could create a radar-like display on a small LCD screen mounted to the cockpit panel.
cheekibreeki2 3y ago
I wish my trip abroad took 3hrs ;)
Moeminhtet 3y ago
[flagged]
brodouevencode 3y ago
10/10 Dad Baked into this post is a glorious example of excellent fatherhood - taking their kids interests (the good kind) and nurturing and fostering them. Using his talent stack to nurture his daughter's talent stack. Good dude.
changadera 3y ago
Disappointed that you live in London and choose the wrong spelling for aeroplane.
drm237 3y ago
It's a very cool app. It would be great to tap on a plane and see its source and destination airports. My kids always ask where I think a plane is going and it would be great to have a way to easily tell them!
sonicanatidae 3y ago
That is so cool. Kudos for a great use of tech!
maltewirz 3y ago
Great app, the API is really unstable unfortunately, I can’t see any planes today :(
SteveNuts 3y ago
Another fun project would be to build your own ADS-B receiver! https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/
- jjwiseman 3y ago
  Once you have a receiver, you can use a raspberry pi image like https://adsb.im/home https://adsb.im/home to easily feed data to more than 20 different networks. FlightAware, FlightRadar24, ADS-B Exchange, airplanes.live, TheAirTraffic, etc. Most of the networks give extra privileges to people who feed them data.
- gattr 3y ago
  Just a few weeks ago I got interested in this as well ("where does FR24 get its data from?"). I ended up buying a cheap RTL-SDR dongle (R820T2) and a small outdoor antenna. I run the free dump1090 tool (I'm on Fedora) to decode ADS-B messages, then my own simple "radar-like" visualization program ([1]) connects to dump1090's network socket to receive decoded data (SBS1 textual format). Even with the antenna just sitting in my room (on a photo tripod), I typically receive data from 10-20 aircraft, up to 190 km away. I drove to a hilltop this weekend (some 600 m higher) and immediately got >100 aircraft, up to 500 km. [1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/plane-tracker https://github.com/GreatAttractor/plane-tracker
  - arch_rust 3y ago
    I see your use of rust, and I have to mention I designed a Rust ADS-B decoder and TUI radar application myself ([1]) [1] https://github.com/rsadsb/adsb_deku/ https://github.com/rsadsb/adsb_deku/
    - gattr 3y ago
      Thanks, good to know! Looks like I'll switch to dump1090_rs.
  - trackone 3y ago
    I don't have any experience with it myself, but you can provide your ADS-B data to ADS-B exchange. https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/
ano-ther 3y ago
Love it! From the error message it seems that too many HN users are trying it out right now. I will come back later.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Yeah, the API is free and has no guaranteed SLO. I think for V2 I'll allow people to enter their OpenSky credentials, since it allows for basic auth V3 (unlikely unless this takes off, pun intended) I might look into paid services.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blt 3y ago
This is great! Small detail question: Did CRT radar scopes really have scan lines? I would have guessed they were vector displays. Re. list of extra features: Since the app targets planespotting, it would be cool to show aircraft type, maybe for a few seconds after you tap a blip.
- labcomputer 3y ago
  Just to expand on one point the other two replies touched on: The beam does indeed scan radially outward from the center (though the angle can either be produced by physically rotating the deflection plates, or computing sin/cos electronically and applying to the x/y plates), and the amplitude of the returned signal does directly drive the beam current (so a target with a larger return will appear brighter. Additionally, there's also a storage tube effect going on, too--but it works like the variable-persistence mode found in certain oscilloscopes, not the bi-stable mode found in storage-tube x-y vector displays for early computers (some o'scopes had both var persist and bi-stable modes). One consequence of the above is related to early attempts at designing stealth airplanes, like the SR-71 and XB-70: The beam current is set such that the radar tube tends to build up the "blip" over multiple sweeps, and the blip usually moves less than its own diameter between sweeps. But, if the airplane has an intrinsically low radar cross-section and if it is moving so fast that the blimp moves a greater distance between sweeps... the radar operator may just interpret the little ghost blips as noise, especially if he or she is overwhelmed by a large number of targets.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ghewgill 3y ago
  They were vector displays. But possibly not quite in the way you're thinking. The original radar displays would scan from the center outward along a radial. The timing of the scan was predefined to scale for distance. The beam intensity signal was directly the (amplified) radar return signal. So a stronger returned signal would cause a more visible "blip" on the long-phosphor display. The interesting part is to make the radar beam scan around the CRT display, the whole cathode tube emitter assembly would be driven by a motor synchronized with the spinning radar dish. This rotation would have to match the speed and direction of the radar dish at all times, otherwise the blips would show in the wrong place. The fixed radial and distance lines would be printed either on the CRT tube itself or on a transparent cover. Displays like this were used for decades, probably well into the 1980s or even early 1990s. Newer versions were able to use simple electronics to scan in the X and Y direction independently, to avoid the more complex rotating beam emitter assembly. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_display#Plan_position_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_display#Plan_position_in...
sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
[flagged]
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  I'm surprised this is getting downvoted: Completely different type of project and misleading headline. Still a cool project!
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I downvoted for implied tone. while their comment is true, sertbdfgbnfgsd could be less of a dick about it.
- qwertox 3y ago
  True, but it even looks more like a radar than Flightradar's radar. Cool tool for a small kid to have.
  - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
    I don't know, phones are addicting and getting a toddler hooked seems like a disservice. There's so many educational things the author could be giving their toddler and they're teaching them to have their eyes glued to their screen from such a young age...
    - HumblyTossed 3y ago
      > I don't know, phones are addicting and getting a toddler hooked seems like a disservice. Phones are not addicting. Algorithmically manipulated services are addicting. > There's so many educational things the author could be giving their toddler and they're teaching them to have their eyes glued to their screen from such a young age... Like how to use one's skills and passions to develop a product for their beloved child?
      - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
m4tthumphrey 3y ago
Slightly off topic: I went to download this and it said I needed iOS17. Out of pure curiosity what from iOS17 does it need? Apologies if it’s mentioned in the article, I just skipped ahead to final product.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cbhl 3y ago
  It is mentioned in the article -- the app uses new APIs in iOS 17 for map annotations.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    Correct, also SwiftUI Metal Shaders (about which I've written an upcoming article) and SFSymbol animations
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Not off-topic at all, happy to answer! - Map Annotations - SwiftUI Metal Shaders (for the CRT effect) - SFSymbol Animations If I remember anything else I'll mention :)
MaximilianEmel 3y ago
I didn't know they still let children into the cockpit anymore!
- toddmorey 3y ago
  I think only when the plane is grounded.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    This would be right!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  I believe they still do after and possibly before the flight. They used to do it during the flight!
  - ghewgill 3y ago
    I've done that! It was on what I think was my first commercial flight, a 767 from probably YVR to LAX sometime in the early 80s. My grandfather was the king of getting kids into fun places, he would go talk up the crew (of the plane, ferry, train, whatever), then come back and fetch whichever grandkids he had. Sadly those days are long gone now.
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      I did the same on my first flight, England to America. I was very shy with the loud American pilots, but I'm sure I wasn't the first shy English boy they'd met. This was in the mid 1990s, and the cabin crew invited me to look. I don't think there were many children on the plane.
ipython 3y ago
I see one issue with this app: the app page clearly says it’s only for 4+ yet your target audience is only 2 :) Nicely done!
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  I hope to stay under the radar of the app store police :D
amelius 3y ago
Eventually you will be building this: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/09/retired-man-travels-around-the-world-with-a-diy-cockpit-he-built-in-his-basement https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/09/retired-man-travels...
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That is extremely cool. I have always planned to make a low-tier version of this for my kid using an old music mixing board
progne 3y ago
I occasionally get large military transport planes that buzz my rural area at very low altitudes, often below my house in a canyon just a 3 iron away. I suppose they're training. The roar is epic. It'd be nice to get a little notification when that's about to happen. Not enough to write my own app for it though. Kudos for the hustle.
- BenjiWiebe 3y ago
  We get similar here and it's on my (long) todo list to set up a notification for low incoming planes.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's a really great little niche market, it's times like this I wish I was more entreprenurial Thank you for the kudos :)
- auspiv 3y ago
  The military planes are hit or miss for what they put out in terms of position. Most will do Mode S transponder, which does not, by itself, include position. But if you get enough of these ADS-B receivers in an area, they can triangulate the position. Every few weeks we have "mean jets" (what our 3 year old calls fighter jets, I think from the Iron Giant) buzz our house near KBJC going in for landing/taking off. They're super loud and often gone before you can get outside to see them (they leave at 400+ kts).
nolongerthere 3y ago
Idk why, but this is delightful to use. There’s something so fun about it. Will likely delete after a few days, but just turning it on and seeing the planes appear on a radar-like screen is just charming.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thanks, that's great to hear :) Will try not to toot my own horn, but I think the explicit goal of making it a toy vs making a commercialised product with ads/aggressive paywalling meant I could make something simple that gives nonzero value without any baggage
mbowcut2 3y ago
This is perfect. We need more hobbyist apps. Minimalist design, simple and solid functionality, and no ads in sight. Shake off the shackles of the advertising dystopia!
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  This comment is perfect :) I think certianly the toddler-based inspo made it easier to turn into a simple toy
ShakataGaNai 3y ago
This is cool in concept, but FlightRadar24 has a built-in Augmented Reality feature that works really well. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/show-us-your-best-augmented-reality-view-photos-to-win-a-free-flightradar24-subscription/ https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/show-us-your-best-augment... Also, if I were to build my own local copy, I'd use an RTLSDR to get the ADSB packets direct and base my app on tar1090. https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090 https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090
- dewey 3y ago
  That's the first thing I thought about too, I use it all the time to confirm my A380 spottings.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  what children truly want, need, and enjoy, is interaction with adults, and the less augmented the reality of the human contact, the real-er it is. build something that doesn't work so well with them, rather than off the shelf something perfect.
  - ShakataGaNai 3y ago
    I'm not suggesting that you give the kid a phone and leave them unattended. But you, as the parent, could totally hold your phone up in AR mode so you both can see what the plane is, and where it's going. Maybe make it a little game. Guess where it's coming from, where it's going to, what kind of plane - then see the answers. If I build and give the kid a display so they can simply stare at it all day without any human interaction... how is that better than the AR on parents phone? It's not, it's worse. (Note, I'm not saying that's what the author actually did, just proposing an option) The technology here is not the problem. Be in AR or CRT. The problem is how we use it and how we teach our kids to use it.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    Now I'm just thinking about how I'd put a CRT filter on AR planes
  - farhaven 3y ago
salawat 3y ago
Careful. This will be tolerated right up until you start building fire-control radars, at which point people with absolutely no sense of humor may take an unhealthy interest in you.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Maybe I'll make a lucrative exit to the military-industrial complex
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  "A fire-control radar (FCR) is a radar that is designed specifically to provide information (mainly target azimuth, elevation, range and range rate) to a fire-control system in order to direct weapons such that they hit a target. They are sometimes known as narrow beam radars,[1] targeting radars, or in the UK, gun-laying radars. If the radar is used to guide a missile, it is often known as a target illuminator or illuminator radar." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-control_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-control_radar That was a new one for me.
louison11 3y ago
Great minds… I published something very similar (albeit less advanced) that also went viral on HN back in September: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379801 Mine is a webapp 80% generated by GPT that makes a sound when a plane enters a certain radius around the user’s location.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Oh awesome! Great minds indeed :) Honestly building a toy for my toddler is some of the most fun I've had coding in years, I can't wait for her to get a little older and start articulate her own ideas
  - louison11 3y ago
    I feel you. I have all kinds of ideas for when he gets a little bit older. For example: a voice-controlled (perhaps motion activated) electric train. I think having a child gives me an excuse to express my inner child's passion for tinkering.
JacobBartlett24 3y ago
Off topic but you have my exact name (first and last). I wonder what the chances are on that.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  You in particular, pretty low. But open up the names to be any first/last combo, and we have the Birthday Paradox. My name is quite a bit more unique than Bartlett, and I still know of about a dozen people with the same first/last as myself. I thought about setting up an FB group named after us and inviting them all just for funsies. None of us are related as far as we can tell, but the name is unique enough that we probably are, if only distantly.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Us Jacob Bartletts gotta stick together
- niccl 3y ago
  numerically, quite low, but given the number of people on the internet, it happens routinely. I'd guess most English speaking people have used <internet_search_of_choice> for their name and found duplicates So: guess maybe 100 million English names on the internet, between 2 and 100 matches, so around 1 in 10 million BTW. I got bored counting the matches for Jacob Bartlett on facebook. definitely more than 10
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    Jacob and Bartlett are both relatively common names, I'd say aggregating over a lifetime one can expect to coincidentially bump into quite a few over the years (since the advent of the internet at least!)
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    I've never met anyone (outside known relatives) with my spelling of surname. When I moved to my current UK city I was surprised to find a Firstname Lastname match in the same city. Facebook shows dozens of the same name in the general area. As I've seen some say, if you're one-in-a-million then there's ~7000 people like you out there somewhere!
jefftk 3y ago
Nice! Minor nits: * It takes me out of the immersion a bit when planes move after having been drawn. It would feel more realistic if the blips were "painted" by the sweep and then static until the next sweep. * To make it a bit more realistic you could extrapolate from previous data points so each plane would make consistent progress from sweep to sweep.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you :) Both very valid points. I think if I was clever with timing and angles the first one is definitely doable. The second one woudl be even simpler - the API returns flight velocity so I can even calculate this from one data point
  - invalidator 3y ago
    I suggest adjusting your gradient so they don't fully fade out until just before the sweep hits them, or maybe even only down to 10%, so they only get wiped by the bar. It'll make it much easier to watch a plane if it doesn't keep disappearing entirely.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      On the other hand, if you want maximum realism, everything should fade continuously from when it is drawn. The underlying technology being imitated here is a slowly decaying phosphor.
      - mfragin 3y ago
        And this is why I still hang out here, after abandoning nearly everything else. I love how a discussion like this can occur here and there's no flaming or egos getting hurt. When you post a labor of love like this, it's great to see the reaction on HN. I spend a lot of time trying to decide what to do with old tech in my volunteer gig. We have old Univac "dumb" terminals and I feel the need to plug them in and see if they still work. I come here for re-charging. I think emulating old hardware is fascinating. Am I the only one who watches old media just to hopefully get a glimpse of the past?
dazhbog 3y ago
I swear there are startups that blabber for years before making an MVP.. Jacob was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps..
- barelyauser 3y ago
  I'm not Jacob Stark...
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    :)
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  In the interests of appeal to modesty, I can tell you about my long history of unreleased apps, failed startups, and false starts :)
  - dylan604 3y ago
    if you're anything like me, you have a stash of items that you just haven't gotten to yet but have every intention of doing something with at some point. law of averages suggests one of them will hit!
oakmad 3y ago
This is great. On my « one day » build list. In a similar vein, my 5yr old son has a flight log book - I started it for him as a baby. Every flight he gives asks one of the crew if the captain wouldn’t mind completing it. It logs route, aircraft and any events that happened. The crew _love_ this kind of thing - we’ve toured cockpits and crew rests and the messages are always gracious. He’s always beaming to get it back. Highly recommend it for little plane geeks.
- ctippett 3y ago
  My father started a logbook for me when I was a toddler which I still keep updated to this day (I'm in my 30s). Every flight I've ever taken is in it. It's a really neat idea.
  - oakmad 3y ago
    That is so cool. I often wonder if I’ve been on this aircraft before, wish I had that data!
- cjrp 3y ago
  +1 on the logbook. We took my daughter London - New York when she was ~8 weeks old, and got some great photos from the cockpit, including her wearing the captain's hat.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  That's genius, being invited into the cockpit felt extremely cool even as a grown adult, so I will absolutely get this started next time we get a flight
  - alberto_ol 3y ago
    I thought that after 9/11 passengers were not allowed to visit the cockopit any more
    - crote 3y ago
Havoc 3y ago
That's super wholesome. Congrats on app and plane-curious kid
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you :)
zwieback 3y ago
So cute! And of Sunday afternoon a flying saucer with green tractor beam came by to check out what the fuss was about.
filterfiber 3y ago
If anyone is interested, you can build your own adsb receiver for very cheap (under 50$), and you can forward the data to all the platforms - ADSB-exchange, airplanes.live, flightradar, flightaware, etc. You'll get the business tier plans on the commercial sites for free, and you'll feed the community exchanges. You'll also be getting the data directly, so they aren't censored, and don't rely on the internet.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  I bet this'd be a lot more reliable than the free API I'm using (no hate to OpenSky though they were very nice and clear to me when I emailed them)
  - auspiv 3y ago
    yep and you also can get multiple updates per second per plane. I think it tops out at 8 or so which is entirely unnecessary for the radar-style app but you can count on an update between each "scan". https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-antenna-to-the-roof/ https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-an... https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft-ads-b-position-signals/ https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft...
dramm 3y ago
OK very nice, but I had brief hope of a home built primary radar featuring a microwave oven magnetron :-)
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Haha when I get on a hardware kick I'll give it a go
- coolliquidcode 3y ago
  Same. Cool project but way less interesting.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    Apologies, I hope the title didn't go to far on the clickbaity side
    - coolliquidcode 3y ago
      Not at all. It was still a really cool writeup. Worth the read but just wanted to see an electronics project.
idatum 3y ago
I wrote a simple program that connects to (default) port 30003 on dump1090-fa (Flightaware version). It parses the ADS-B output and uses Flightaware's AeroAPI (there is a free tier based on requests) to augment with airline, aircraft, and city departure information. I then publish to my MQTT (Mosquitto) broker for planes within 2.1 nautical miles (i.e. I can visually make them out). An MQTT client on an RPi3 (Linux) subscribes to those messages and uses a TTS service (Azure) to generate a wave file. I then use USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) to play it to me while I sit on my patio and watch local planes fly by. I live near a couple major airports, so most of the planes are easy to spot (~5000 MSL). It's a simple pleasure.
- jjwiseman 3y ago
  I have an iOS shortcut that anyone can use to do something similar. Install it, name it "What's Overhead", and then you can say "Siri, what's overhead?" and then Siri will speak details on whatever aircraft is closest to you. I use it when driving, or via my watch if I hear an unusual plane or helicopter and don't want to pull out my phone. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92f43e8881ce4291b48b28a4b0b3f41d https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92f43e8881ce4291b48b28a4b0b...
  - bbarn 3y ago
    Great idea. Simple but effective, I'm up on a mountain with weird military traffic here and there, in addition to commercial stuff, so I'll play with this when I am driving around for sure.
- alexpotato 3y ago
  > then use Linux USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part. Only if you're not using ffmpeg or (c)vlc.
victor106 3y ago
> Which begs the question, why can’t Google Maps ever work out which direction I am facing? I always wondered this as well. Apple Maps seems to be much better at this
- fragmede 3y ago
  My Apple maps consistently has me 90° off from where I'm actually pointed.
  - jakey_bakey 3y ago
    My man at Apple Maps forgot to account for Header
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Right! I was expecting it to be hard, but I literally get my orientation streamed by CoreLocation
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  When I was in Tokyo I noticed that the compass was completely useless. Too much EMI?
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  It used to do it fine and then they had an update that made it terrible. You need to hold your phone flat, if it’s at even a slight angle it stops working.
dottjt 3y ago
My first initial thought to this headline was he actually built a radar for his own curiosity, not because their toddler loves planes.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  It's a little clear which of us got more out of the project
bonniemuffin 3y ago
I like the idea that changing the display color was a must-have feature for the initial release. Shows a very solid understanding of the target demographic's user needs. (My 3yo loves any toy that includes a color picker!)
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  One of the most underrated SwiftUI components Even if I show her today the first thing she cares about doing is picking a colour (which is great for fine motor skills!)
- isametry 3y ago
  Heck, I’m a grown man and I get giddy too when something includes a color picker! (Imagine my irrational excitement when I surpassed 250 karma here on HN)
  - brantonb 3y ago
    Thank you for making me one of today’s lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
hn_ta456 3y ago
Love the design, but super uncomfortable with giving phones to toddlers as toys. For mine, the longer I can put it off the better. There are enough infants bumbling around the world already glued to screens, in imitation of their zombie parents (this is a general observation, not levelled at OP). For the inevitable “but kids need to learn how to use phones as tools” - tools for what? They are designed to consume you and your attention. I also don’t regard the ability to halt a conversation while you ‘look something up’ as a benefit.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Very reasonable point to be fair, and I agree with you. I certainly would not be comfortable building something for a kid to stare at that had no relation to the real world
  - hn_ta456 3y ago
    Arguably most apps have a relation to the real world - chat and live video sharing, etc.
- footy 3y ago
  Is that really what's happening here though? Seems like the author is using the app with their toddler, and it's only a tool to do something in the real world. Kind of made me think of my dad teaching me to use a compass or looking at star charts with me in the early 90s.
renewiltord 3y ago
This is a terrific toy. Great work!
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Thank you :)

1304 points by jakey_bakey 3y ago

I thought about building a laser system to write on overcast skies at night and realized it would have to have something like this so it doesn’t pass any aircraft.

int32 3y ago

Awesome, thank you for making this app! My 2yo is obsessed with planes too and we spent a good chunk of our day looking up the sky scanning for planes :) We tried the Flightradar24 app too but it is way to distracting for him... can't wait to show him tomorrow!

1-more 3y ago

Related "An app can be a home cooked meal" on cloning the defunct social network app Tapstack for just his family's usage https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's a lovely article, bookmarked! Agree, I'd have been happy with zero downloads because the process was rewarding itself. Going viral also not bad though.
- 1-more 3y ago
  for sure! Congrats on your big W!

bunabhucan 3y ago

>the crew spots you with a cute plane-obsessed toddler, they invite you in to check out the cockpit. Matching NASA orange jumpsuits are the passport into every cockpit. The crew gets way more excited than the kids. Also makes them super easy to find in the airport.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's genius, so I just need myself or my wife to get into NASA. Do they need many iOS devs in space?

jaxelr 3y ago

My son loves this app and he’s 7. Thanks! A small gripe, I’m unsure whats the api refresh rate and my kid continues closing and opening the app and then it sporadically gets time outs on the API. That being said, I much appreciate taking the time to release it and blog about it.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's awesome, glad he liked it! Very fair - the OpenSky API has no SLO, so it will sporadically fail to reload. I'm working on better retry logic in V2, and potentially the ability to login with your own OpenSky account (http basic auth)

magicmicah85 3y ago

I love the design but go one step further - forget the API and get an SDR that is tuned to ADB frequencies at 1090 Mhz and gather the data yourself. Then she'll have a true radar. Edit: fair point on what a radar is, today I re-remembered :)

RachelF 3y ago
Nice app and writeup - but she won't have a radar - she'll have an app that displays the positions of airplanes. A true radar needs to transmit and receive. The SDR is still just listening to the telemetry from the plane, which they transmit all the time for this ADS mode.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  You can have passive radar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar But yes, it needs to be doing more than receiving telemetry to qualify, and there has to be something transmitting.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  TIL what a radar is :)
TheSwordsman 3y ago
Disregarding the other replies for a moment where they rightfully call out that it wouldn't be radar, wouldn't they still need a publicly available API for this data if they wanted to access it outside of their house (e.g., when at the park)? So at that point, why add the additional complexity if there's already someone sharing ADS-B data to OpenSky for your area?
- magicmicah85 3y ago
  Why add the complexity? Cause you can. You can also submit the data to contribute while at the same time receiving and displaying it in their webpage.
- 3y ago

StephenAmar 3y ago

There's a really cool setup at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vZjWb5n6E&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16vZjWb5n6E&t=1s My son can spend hours just waiting for planes landing in SFO.

xrd 3y ago

So many people say: "Don't take young kids abroad, they won't really remember those travels." BS. I took my son to Brazil, it was great, we got on a $1 cab ride, got on a pirate ship, endless alpine slide after the aerial tram, and went to the Botanical Garden in Rio. (He did say: "that day was totally boring, we didn't do anything!", but I know it was the greatest day of his life, and I can point out all those things to him and he'll not demur). Later, I took my three kids to Barcelona and Greece. They don't remember the time we took a bus from Athens to the beach and they were rolling around on the dirty floor of a bus, but they do remember the Abba-themed wedding. Those experiences matter.

QkPrsMizkYvt 3y ago
Very off topic, but I +1 this. I am half and half and as a baby and young kid we went to one spot every summary. To this day I remember these travels. They matter a lot indeed.
- xrd 3y ago
  That's great to hear. I think my kids recall the experiences, but you do, and you were a kid doing that. In twenty years I hope to hear the same things from my kids.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I mean, I’m not half, and I never went further than +/- 200 km from my hometown until I was 23 years old, but we did go on vacation somewhere every year. I _still_ remember all that travel too. It was different enough to make a lasting impression. 99% of our life is spent in the same 2 sqkm area, so it’s not super surprising that everything else is different.
Elora 3y ago
I don't think it's strictly the experience in a memory facsimile, "let me quiz the kids" format that matters. There are a mind boggling number of new and unique data points and methods of delivery kids are exposed to during travel which is really healthy for a developing human mind to have as part of its growth regimen. Travel is one of the last things I will cut if times get tough for our family, before essentials such as food and shelter.

tgtweak 3y ago

Advice for a wholesome activity with your daughter: Bring her to the closest road/parking lot/park at the inbound end of your closest international airport runway (Typically this changes based on wind direction). Park and watch the planes come in and land. She can use her "radar" to see which planes are coming in (we used flightradar24). My kids were FLOORED how close the planes get to the ground on approach - especially the bigger jetliners. Easily entertained for hours and had to bargain with them to leave because they wanted to see if the next plane was bigger/closer than the last.

lannisterstark 3y ago
Bring some earmuffs.
JohnFen 3y ago
When I was in high school, there was a gravel lot just outside of the airport perimeter fencing at the end of one of the runways. When the wind was going the right direction so that the airplanes were taking off over that lot, it was the place to park and make out.
ridgeguy 3y ago
And if you're in the D.C. area, Gravely Point is the place for this. Feels like you can count the rivets for planes on either departure or landing.
- neilv 3y ago
  For Logan airport in Boston, Revere Beach is one place with a pretty good view of airliners, and is short walk from the Blue Line. You can also see a bunch of other places on a map that line up with runways: South Boston (including Castle Island), East Boston, and a bit further from Logan is the harborwalk around Long Wharf and the aquarium. (The aquarium might also be interesting to kids. There's some free viewing windows for a little of it, while walking past, to maybe gauge interest before paying admission. And there's various tourist things in that area, including various harbor boat rides.) A camera/cameraphone with >1x lens will get them a closer look at planes. Or binoculars/monocular if you want to reduce screen time, or to encourage appreciating it in the moment rather than trying to capture it. (What kind of hearing protection works for kids?)

Full_Clark 3y ago

Nice work and nice writeup. It's interesting to me how strongly the design of original radar displays anchors the project. Your toddler might never interact with a real CRT, much less an ASR-9 with a PPI display. But you've gone to great lengths to simulate one for her. Partly because of your affinity for skeumorphism, as you said, but it may also be because the OG radar display is a fantastic distillation of "Is there something in the sky and where is it relative to me?" All the UIs we have for sky-watching now have moved away from that in favor of contextual data or linking out to other services (or creating space to display ads). In the process of presenting all that additional information, they've lost the ability to easily answer that particular question.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Really appreciate the feedback :) I think I was very well served by having a very pure motive: What direction should I look to find a plane, and worked up from there.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I like your comment — it points out that our RADAR displays were a both a product of the technology that was used to generate them (the sweep) but also that it was a deliberate way to make clear what it was you were observing (target distance was represented by distance from center, target bearing by angle around the circle). To your point though, perhaps emulating the sweep was the questionable design decision — the bright colors, map-less background not controversial at all since they help focus on the intent of the display. I did notice that as I turn with the phone, the compass-tracking feature broke the illusion of the sweep. :-)
- seanc 3y ago
  Now I have a funny vision in my head of a WWII radio tech standing in a field, wearing an absurdly large RADAR rig, with a big sweeping antenna protruding from a backpack and a massive screen on his chest, turning this way and that, all confused by how the sweep doesn't look quite right...

icemanind 3y ago

This is awesome! Now I'd like to see an Android version or better yet, a port to something like React-Native, so it can work on any device, iOS or Android!

0x38B 3y ago

Jacob, what a cool project! It was fun to read, which speaks to your writing skills. On my iPhone SE (2020) the scan-line effect is distractingly low res (1), perhaps because of my lower screen resolution? 1: https://nexus.armylane.com/files/RPReplay_Final1701128035.mov https://nexus.armylane.com/files/RPReplay_Final1701128035.mo...

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Hey, thank you for the bug report! I think I know the culprit, my Shader which is applying the CRT effect shouldn't scale the scanlines with screen size, they should be constant sized - I noticed the same issue when you go to the app switcher.

harshreality 3y ago

Now you get to explain to her in a few years how different ADS-B-based web data (or locally received ADS-B, even) is from genuine RAdio-Detection-And-Ranging (either the old school rotating type or modern fancy PESA/AESA ones). And she'll forever remind you how your app [name] is a lie.

Nextgrid 3y ago
What a fitting username!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ginkgotree 3y ago

As a Pilot, this is amazing. Bravo!

alberth 3y ago

Love the simplicity. > ”A Learjet at 40,000 feet shows up the same as an AirBus that just took off at London City Airport, however it’s a lot easier to spot the jumbo jet in the real sky.” When I use FlightRadar24, I actually see different icons for jumbo jets vs Learjets vs prop planes - so they do not show up the same for me. Maybe the author means altitude is not distinguished per this quote: > ”I added some simple log scaling to the map annotations using the altitude of the flight so higher up aircraft appear larger on-screen.” After downloading the app, planes high in the sky overlap/hide planes lower to the ground. I wonder if color coding the planes would have been better than using different size planes to indicate altitude. Eg brown/green planes mean close to the ground, and blue planes mean high in the sky. Then have all planes the same size, and use different plane icon shapes for distinguishing commercial jet vs private jet vs prop

jakey_bakey 3y ago
I have this addressed in V2: The transponder gives an approximate size class for the aircraft, so I'll be able to scale them better if I use this

jakedahn 3y ago

Thank you for making this! I have a 1.5yo that’s obsessed with pointing out planes in the sky. Now we can go plane watching together!

ghiculescu 3y ago

My toddler has a similar back story (flight hype -> loves planes). This inspired me to finally upgrade my iOS.

ingen0s 3y ago

Very cool and inspirational!

khieu123 3y ago

[flagged]

zoom6628 3y ago

Just wanted to say what a wonderfully uplifting comment thread here in HN all launched by a heartwarming article. Such a pleasure to read of the kids delight, people's travels and fun as kids and with their own children. + a billion!!

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you :D It's quite nice the level of positivity, versus some of my other deep technical write-ups which might have a small inaccuracy Toys are harder to mess up!

gregorvand 3y ago

Funny, I just re-watched the Gener8 DD pitch yesterday coincidentally and checked out where you guys were at since then. Great write up! Just need to upgrade my iPad OS to give it a spin

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's awesome! Any feedback on the apps are welcome

_kush 3y ago

This is brilliant - thanks for sharing the story. This is one of those ideas that, on the surface, looks really hard to build but your breakdown made it look super easy. Very inspiring :)

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you :) It was probably my easiest ever article to write, since I was simply coding each evening and adding a few cliffnotes, screenshots, and snippets as I went. When it came to writing, it was just filling in the blanks :)

s4i 3y ago

> But, in order to make sure she could handle the 3-hour flight, my wife and I made sure to hype up the airplane journey. So much so, that my toddler was shocked when we had to get into a cab for the airport — she expected to walk straight from our house onto a plane. This is absolutely adorable, hilarious and understandable at the same time.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Haha yeah, I think by the journey back she started to get the hang of it
seanc 3y ago
Fun fact, there's a swanky gated community in Florida where you can do just that: https://www.architecturendesign.net/john-travoltas-house-is-a-functional-airport-with-2-runways-for-his-private-planes/ https://www.architecturendesign.net/john-travoltas-house-is-...
- pc86 3y ago
  Fly-in communities are actually pretty common as far as aviation stuff goes. There are probably several hundred in the US.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    But most of them have runways made for small general aviation bugsmashers, not 707s.
  - JTbane 3y ago
    While that sounds like a great concept I'd be worried about the constant lawnmower tier noise that GA planes make over my home.
    - pc86 3y ago
      Then you probably shouldn't buy a house where the biggest selling point is that it's directly connected to a runway.

cyanfrog 3y ago

The apps doesn't work for me. Connection is timing out.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Sorry about that - the free API has no SLO, so sometimes you need to check back later on to get it working! V2 will allow you to use HTTP basic auth and your own OpenSky account

ahoka 3y ago

I was hoping he was actually building a radar, but this is not one. Still nice though.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Apologies about that. I hope it doesn't quite fall into clickbait territory My friend in NSO group is working on hacking the iPhone to pick up transponder signals, watch this space

boomskats 3y ago

Interesting how the OpenSky API shows all of the private jets at Farnborough, whereas the flightradar24 UI hides them.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's a great point! I reckon FlightRadar might have a side hustle of hush money :)

dozaa 3y ago

The fade in-out solution was genius! Knowing myself I would've definitely over-complicated it and spent ages writing spaghetti.

shultays 3y ago

"I wanted to make a radar app and here is my toddler for cuteness points"

WentFullRetard 3y ago

[dead]

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Was part of a project to put a similar display in the cockpit. Using transponder data which includes GPS location, you could create a radar-like display on a small LCD screen mounted to the cockpit panel.

cheekibreeki2 3y ago

I wish my trip abroad took 3hrs ;)

Moeminhtet 3y ago

[flagged]

brodouevencode 3y ago

10/10 Dad Baked into this post is a glorious example of excellent fatherhood - taking their kids interests (the good kind) and nurturing and fostering them. Using his talent stack to nurture his daughter's talent stack. Good dude.

changadera 3y ago

Disappointed that you live in London and choose the wrong spelling for aeroplane.

drm237 3y ago

It's a very cool app. It would be great to tap on a plane and see its source and destination airports. My kids always ask where I think a plane is going and it would be great to have a way to easily tell them!

sonicanatidae 3y ago

That is so cool. Kudos for a great use of tech!

maltewirz 3y ago

Great app, the API is really unstable unfortunately, I can’t see any planes today :(

SteveNuts 3y ago

Another fun project would be to build your own ADS-B receiver! https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/

jjwiseman 3y ago
Once you have a receiver, you can use a raspberry pi image like https://adsb.im/home https://adsb.im/home to easily feed data to more than 20 different networks. FlightAware, FlightRadar24, ADS-B Exchange, airplanes.live, TheAirTraffic, etc. Most of the networks give extra privileges to people who feed them data.
gattr 3y ago
Just a few weeks ago I got interested in this as well ("where does FR24 get its data from?"). I ended up buying a cheap RTL-SDR dongle (R820T2) and a small outdoor antenna. I run the free dump1090 tool (I'm on Fedora) to decode ADS-B messages, then my own simple "radar-like" visualization program ([1]) connects to dump1090's network socket to receive decoded data (SBS1 textual format). Even with the antenna just sitting in my room (on a photo tripod), I typically receive data from 10-20 aircraft, up to 190 km away. I drove to a hilltop this weekend (some 600 m higher) and immediately got >100 aircraft, up to 500 km. [1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/plane-tracker https://github.com/GreatAttractor/plane-tracker
- arch_rust 3y ago
  I see your use of rust, and I have to mention I designed a Rust ADS-B decoder and TUI radar application myself ([1]) [1] https://github.com/rsadsb/adsb_deku/ https://github.com/rsadsb/adsb_deku/
  - gattr 3y ago
    Thanks, good to know! Looks like I'll switch to dump1090_rs.
- trackone 3y ago
  I don't have any experience with it myself, but you can provide your ADS-B data to ADS-B exchange. https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/ways-to-join-the-exchange/

ano-ther 3y ago

Love it! From the error message it seems that too many HN users are trying it out right now. I will come back later.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Yeah, the API is free and has no guaranteed SLO. I think for V2 I'll allow people to enter their OpenSky credentials, since it allows for basic auth V3 (unlikely unless this takes off, pun intended) I might look into paid services.

deleted 3y ago

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blt 3y ago

This is great! Small detail question: Did CRT radar scopes really have scan lines? I would have guessed they were vector displays. Re. list of extra features: Since the app targets planespotting, it would be cool to show aircraft type, maybe for a few seconds after you tap a blip.

labcomputer 3y ago
Just to expand on one point the other two replies touched on: The beam does indeed scan radially outward from the center (though the angle can either be produced by physically rotating the deflection plates, or computing sin/cos electronically and applying to the x/y plates), and the amplitude of the returned signal does directly drive the beam current (so a target with a larger return will appear brighter. Additionally, there's also a storage tube effect going on, too--but it works like the variable-persistence mode found in certain oscilloscopes, not the bi-stable mode found in storage-tube x-y vector displays for early computers (some o'scopes had both var persist and bi-stable modes). One consequence of the above is related to early attempts at designing stealth airplanes, like the SR-71 and XB-70: The beam current is set such that the radar tube tends to build up the "blip" over multiple sweeps, and the blip usually moves less than its own diameter between sweeps. But, if the airplane has an intrinsically low radar cross-section and if it is moving so fast that the blimp moves a greater distance between sweeps... the radar operator may just interpret the little ghost blips as noise, especially if he or she is overwhelmed by a large number of targets.
deleted 3y ago
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ghewgill 3y ago
They were vector displays. But possibly not quite in the way you're thinking. The original radar displays would scan from the center outward along a radial. The timing of the scan was predefined to scale for distance. The beam intensity signal was directly the (amplified) radar return signal. So a stronger returned signal would cause a more visible "blip" on the long-phosphor display. The interesting part is to make the radar beam scan around the CRT display, the whole cathode tube emitter assembly would be driven by a motor synchronized with the spinning radar dish. This rotation would have to match the speed and direction of the radar dish at all times, otherwise the blips would show in the wrong place. The fixed radial and distance lines would be printed either on the CRT tube itself or on a transparent cover. Displays like this were used for decades, probably well into the 1980s or even early 1990s. Newer versions were able to use simple electronics to scan in the X and Y direction independently, to avoid the more complex rotating beam emitter assembly. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_display#Plan_position_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_display#Plan_position_in...

sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

[flagged]

the__alchemist 3y ago
I'm surprised this is getting downvoted: Completely different type of project and misleading headline. Still a cool project!
- fragmede 3y ago
  I downvoted for implied tone. while their comment is true, sertbdfgbnfgsd could be less of a dick about it.
qwertox 3y ago
True, but it even looks more like a radar than Flightradar's radar. Cool tool for a small kid to have.
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago
  I don't know, phones are addicting and getting a toddler hooked seems like a disservice. There's so many educational things the author could be giving their toddler and they're teaching them to have their eyes glued to their screen from such a young age...
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    > I don't know, phones are addicting and getting a toddler hooked seems like a disservice. Phones are not addicting. Algorithmically manipulated services are addicting. > There's so many educational things the author could be giving their toddler and they're teaching them to have their eyes glued to their screen from such a young age... Like how to use one's skills and passions to develop a product for their beloved child?
    - sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago

m4tthumphrey 3y ago

Slightly off topic: I went to download this and it said I needed iOS17. Out of pure curiosity what from iOS17 does it need? Apologies if it’s mentioned in the article, I just skipped ahead to final product.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cbhl 3y ago
It is mentioned in the article -- the app uses new APIs in iOS 17 for map annotations.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Correct, also SwiftUI Metal Shaders (about which I've written an upcoming article) and SFSymbol animations
jakey_bakey 3y ago
Not off-topic at all, happy to answer! - Map Annotations - SwiftUI Metal Shaders (for the CRT effect) - SFSymbol Animations If I remember anything else I'll mention :)

MaximilianEmel 3y ago

I didn't know they still let children into the cockpit anymore!

toddmorey 3y ago
I think only when the plane is grounded.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  This would be right!
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
I believe they still do after and possibly before the flight. They used to do it during the flight!
- ghewgill 3y ago
  I've done that! It was on what I think was my first commercial flight, a 767 from probably YVR to LAX sometime in the early 80s. My grandfather was the king of getting kids into fun places, he would go talk up the crew (of the plane, ferry, train, whatever), then come back and fetch whichever grandkids he had. Sadly those days are long gone now.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    I did the same on my first flight, England to America. I was very shy with the loud American pilots, but I'm sure I wasn't the first shy English boy they'd met. This was in the mid 1990s, and the cabin crew invited me to look. I don't think there were many children on the plane.

ipython 3y ago

I see one issue with this app: the app page clearly says it’s only for 4+ yet your target audience is only 2 :) Nicely done!

jakey_bakey 3y ago
I hope to stay under the radar of the app store police :D

amelius 3y ago

Eventually you will be building this: https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/09/retired-man-travels-around-the-world-with-a-diy-cockpit-he-built-in-his-basement https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/12/09/retired-man-travels...

jakey_bakey 3y ago
That is extremely cool. I have always planned to make a low-tier version of this for my kid using an old music mixing board

progne 3y ago

I occasionally get large military transport planes that buzz my rural area at very low altitudes, often below my house in a canyon just a 3 iron away. I suppose they're training. The roar is epic. It'd be nice to get a little notification when that's about to happen. Not enough to write my own app for it though. Kudos for the hustle.

BenjiWiebe 3y ago
We get similar here and it's on my (long) todo list to set up a notification for low incoming planes.
jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's a really great little niche market, it's times like this I wish I was more entreprenurial Thank you for the kudos :)
auspiv 3y ago
The military planes are hit or miss for what they put out in terms of position. Most will do Mode S transponder, which does not, by itself, include position. But if you get enough of these ADS-B receivers in an area, they can triangulate the position. Every few weeks we have "mean jets" (what our 3 year old calls fighter jets, I think from the Iron Giant) buzz our house near KBJC going in for landing/taking off. They're super loud and often gone before you can get outside to see them (they leave at 400+ kts).

nolongerthere 3y ago

Idk why, but this is delightful to use. There’s something so fun about it. Will likely delete after a few days, but just turning it on and seeing the planes appear on a radar-like screen is just charming.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thanks, that's great to hear :) Will try not to toot my own horn, but I think the explicit goal of making it a toy vs making a commercialised product with ads/aggressive paywalling meant I could make something simple that gives nonzero value without any baggage

mbowcut2 3y ago

This is perfect. We need more hobbyist apps. Minimalist design, simple and solid functionality, and no ads in sight. Shake off the shackles of the advertising dystopia!

jakey_bakey 3y ago
This comment is perfect :) I think certianly the toddler-based inspo made it easier to turn into a simple toy

ShakataGaNai 3y ago

This is cool in concept, but FlightRadar24 has a built-in Augmented Reality feature that works really well. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/show-us-your-best-augmented-reality-view-photos-to-win-a-free-flightradar24-subscription/ https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/show-us-your-best-augment... Also, if I were to build my own local copy, I'd use an RTLSDR to get the ADSB packets direct and base my app on tar1090. https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090 https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090

dewey 3y ago
That's the first thing I thought about too, I use it all the time to confirm my A380 spottings.
fsckboy 3y ago
what children truly want, need, and enjoy, is interaction with adults, and the less augmented the reality of the human contact, the real-er it is. build something that doesn't work so well with them, rather than off the shelf something perfect.
- ShakataGaNai 3y ago
  I'm not suggesting that you give the kid a phone and leave them unattended. But you, as the parent, could totally hold your phone up in AR mode so you both can see what the plane is, and where it's going. Maybe make it a little game. Guess where it's coming from, where it's going to, what kind of plane - then see the answers. If I build and give the kid a display so they can simply stare at it all day without any human interaction... how is that better than the AR on parents phone? It's not, it's worse. (Note, I'm not saying that's what the author actually did, just proposing an option) The technology here is not the problem. Be in AR or CRT. The problem is how we use it and how we teach our kids to use it.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Now I'm just thinking about how I'd put a CRT filter on AR planes
- farhaven 3y ago

salawat 3y ago

Careful. This will be tolerated right up until you start building fire-control radars, at which point people with absolutely no sense of humor may take an unhealthy interest in you.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Maybe I'll make a lucrative exit to the military-industrial complex
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
"A fire-control radar (FCR) is a radar that is designed specifically to provide information (mainly target azimuth, elevation, range and range rate) to a fire-control system in order to direct weapons such that they hit a target. They are sometimes known as narrow beam radars,[1] targeting radars, or in the UK, gun-laying radars. If the radar is used to guide a missile, it is often known as a target illuminator or illuminator radar." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-control_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-control_radar That was a new one for me.

louison11 3y ago

Great minds… I published something very similar (albeit less advanced) that also went viral on HN back in September: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37379801 Mine is a webapp 80% generated by GPT that makes a sound when a plane enters a certain radius around the user’s location.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Oh awesome! Great minds indeed :) Honestly building a toy for my toddler is some of the most fun I've had coding in years, I can't wait for her to get a little older and start articulate her own ideas
- louison11 3y ago
  I feel you. I have all kinds of ideas for when he gets a little bit older. For example: a voice-controlled (perhaps motion activated) electric train. I think having a child gives me an excuse to express my inner child's passion for tinkering.

JacobBartlett24 3y ago

Off topic but you have my exact name (first and last). I wonder what the chances are on that.

rootusrootus 3y ago
You in particular, pretty low. But open up the names to be any first/last combo, and we have the Birthday Paradox. My name is quite a bit more unique than Bartlett, and I still know of about a dozen people with the same first/last as myself. I thought about setting up an FB group named after us and inviting them all just for funsies. None of us are related as far as we can tell, but the name is unique enough that we probably are, if only distantly.
jakey_bakey 3y ago
Us Jacob Bartletts gotta stick together
niccl 3y ago
numerically, quite low, but given the number of people on the internet, it happens routinely. I'd guess most English speaking people have used <internet_search_of_choice> for their name and found duplicates So: guess maybe 100 million English names on the internet, between 2 and 100 matches, so around 1 in 10 million BTW. I got bored counting the matches for Jacob Bartlett on facebook. definitely more than 10
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Jacob and Bartlett are both relatively common names, I'd say aggregating over a lifetime one can expect to coincidentially bump into quite a few over the years (since the advent of the internet at least!)
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I've never met anyone (outside known relatives) with my spelling of surname. When I moved to my current UK city I was surprised to find a Firstname Lastname match in the same city. Facebook shows dozens of the same name in the general area. As I've seen some say, if you're one-in-a-million then there's ~7000 people like you out there somewhere!

jefftk 3y ago

Nice! Minor nits: * It takes me out of the immersion a bit when planes move after having been drawn. It would feel more realistic if the blips were "painted" by the sweep and then static until the next sweep. * To make it a bit more realistic you could extrapolate from previous data points so each plane would make consistent progress from sweep to sweep.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you :) Both very valid points. I think if I was clever with timing and angles the first one is definitely doable. The second one woudl be even simpler - the API returns flight velocity so I can even calculate this from one data point
- invalidator 3y ago
  I suggest adjusting your gradient so they don't fully fade out until just before the sweep hits them, or maybe even only down to 10%, so they only get wiped by the bar. It'll make it much easier to watch a plane if it doesn't keep disappearing entirely.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    On the other hand, if you want maximum realism, everything should fade continuously from when it is drawn. The underlying technology being imitated here is a slowly decaying phosphor.
    - mfragin 3y ago
      And this is why I still hang out here, after abandoning nearly everything else. I love how a discussion like this can occur here and there's no flaming or egos getting hurt. When you post a labor of love like this, it's great to see the reaction on HN. I spend a lot of time trying to decide what to do with old tech in my volunteer gig. We have old Univac "dumb" terminals and I feel the need to plug them in and see if they still work. I come here for re-charging. I think emulating old hardware is fascinating. Am I the only one who watches old media just to hopefully get a glimpse of the past?

dazhbog 3y ago

I swear there are startups that blabber for years before making an MVP.. Jacob was able to build this in a cave, with a box of scraps..

barelyauser 3y ago
I'm not Jacob Stark...
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  :)
jakey_bakey 3y ago
In the interests of appeal to modesty, I can tell you about my long history of unreleased apps, failed startups, and false starts :)
- dylan604 3y ago
  if you're anything like me, you have a stash of items that you just haven't gotten to yet but have every intention of doing something with at some point. law of averages suggests one of them will hit!

oakmad 3y ago

This is great. On my « one day » build list. In a similar vein, my 5yr old son has a flight log book - I started it for him as a baby. Every flight he gives asks one of the crew if the captain wouldn’t mind completing it. It logs route, aircraft and any events that happened. The crew _love_ this kind of thing - we’ve toured cockpits and crew rests and the messages are always gracious. He’s always beaming to get it back. Highly recommend it for little plane geeks.

ctippett 3y ago
My father started a logbook for me when I was a toddler which I still keep updated to this day (I'm in my 30s). Every flight I've ever taken is in it. It's a really neat idea.
- oakmad 3y ago
  That is so cool. I often wonder if I’ve been on this aircraft before, wish I had that data!
cjrp 3y ago
+1 on the logbook. We took my daughter London - New York when she was ~8 weeks old, and got some great photos from the cockpit, including her wearing the captain's hat.
jakey_bakey 3y ago
That's genius, being invited into the cockpit felt extremely cool even as a grown adult, so I will absolutely get this started next time we get a flight
- alberto_ol 3y ago
  I thought that after 9/11 passengers were not allowed to visit the cockopit any more
  - crote 3y ago

Havoc 3y ago

That's super wholesome. Congrats on app and plane-curious kid

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you :)

zwieback 3y ago

So cute! And of Sunday afternoon a flying saucer with green tractor beam came by to check out what the fuss was about.

filterfiber 3y ago

If anyone is interested, you can build your own adsb receiver for very cheap (under 50$), and you can forward the data to all the platforms - ADSB-exchange, airplanes.live, flightradar, flightaware, etc. You'll get the business tier plans on the commercial sites for free, and you'll feed the community exchanges. You'll also be getting the data directly, so they aren't censored, and don't rely on the internet.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
I bet this'd be a lot more reliable than the free API I'm using (no hate to OpenSky though they were very nice and clear to me when I emailed them)
- auspiv 3y ago
  yep and you also can get multiple updates per second per plane. I think it tops out at 8 or so which is entirely unnecessary for the radar-style app but you can count on an update between each "scan". https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-antenna-to-the-roof/ https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-an... https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft-ads-b-position-signals/ https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft...

dramm 3y ago

OK very nice, but I had brief hope of a home built primary radar featuring a microwave oven magnetron :-)

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Haha when I get on a hardware kick I'll give it a go
coolliquidcode 3y ago
Same. Cool project but way less interesting.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  Apologies, I hope the title didn't go to far on the clickbaity side
  - coolliquidcode 3y ago
    Not at all. It was still a really cool writeup. Worth the read but just wanted to see an electronics project.

idatum 3y ago

I wrote a simple program that connects to (default) port 30003 on dump1090-fa (Flightaware version). It parses the ADS-B output and uses Flightaware's AeroAPI (there is a free tier based on requests) to augment with airline, aircraft, and city departure information. I then publish to my MQTT (Mosquitto) broker for planes within 2.1 nautical miles (i.e. I can visually make them out). An MQTT client on an RPi3 (Linux) subscribes to those messages and uses a TTS service (Azure) to generate a wave file. I then use USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) to play it to me while I sit on my patio and watch local planes fly by. I live near a couple major airports, so most of the planes are easy to spot (~5000 MSL). It's a simple pleasure.

jjwiseman 3y ago
I have an iOS shortcut that anyone can use to do something similar. Install it, name it "What's Overhead", and then you can say "Siri, what's overhead?" and then Siri will speak details on whatever aircraft is closest to you. I use it when driving, or via my watch if I hear an unusual plane or helicopter and don't want to pull out my phone. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92f43e8881ce4291b48b28a4b0b3f41d https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/92f43e8881ce4291b48b28a4b0b...
- bbarn 3y ago
  Great idea. Simple but effective, I'm up on a mountain with weird military traffic here and there, in addition to commercial stuff, so I'll play with this when I am driving around for sure.
alexpotato 3y ago
> then use Linux USB audio (this might have been the hardest part) Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Linux Audio is ALWAYS that hardest part. Only if you're not using ffmpeg or (c)vlc.

victor106 3y ago

> Which begs the question, why can’t Google Maps ever work out which direction I am facing? I always wondered this as well. Apple Maps seems to be much better at this

fragmede 3y ago
My Apple maps consistently has me 90° off from where I'm actually pointed.
- jakey_bakey 3y ago
  My man at Apple Maps forgot to account for Header
jakey_bakey 3y ago
Right! I was expecting it to be hard, but I literally get my orientation streamed by CoreLocation
RockRobotRock 3y ago
When I was in Tokyo I noticed that the compass was completely useless. Too much EMI?
lloydatkinson 3y ago
It used to do it fine and then they had an update that made it terrible. You need to hold your phone flat, if it’s at even a slight angle it stops working.

dottjt 3y ago

My first initial thought to this headline was he actually built a radar for his own curiosity, not because their toddler loves planes.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
It's a little clear which of us got more out of the project

bonniemuffin 3y ago

I like the idea that changing the display color was a must-have feature for the initial release. Shows a very solid understanding of the target demographic's user needs. (My 3yo loves any toy that includes a color picker!)

jakey_bakey 3y ago
One of the most underrated SwiftUI components Even if I show her today the first thing she cares about doing is picking a colour (which is great for fine motor skills!)
isametry 3y ago
Heck, I’m a grown man and I get giddy too when something includes a color picker! (Imagine my irrational excitement when I surpassed 250 karma here on HN)
- brantonb 3y ago
  Thank you for making me one of today’s lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

hn_ta456 3y ago

Love the design, but super uncomfortable with giving phones to toddlers as toys. For mine, the longer I can put it off the better. There are enough infants bumbling around the world already glued to screens, in imitation of their zombie parents (this is a general observation, not levelled at OP). For the inevitable “but kids need to learn how to use phones as tools” - tools for what? They are designed to consume you and your attention. I also don’t regard the ability to halt a conversation while you ‘look something up’ as a benefit.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Very reasonable point to be fair, and I agree with you. I certainly would not be comfortable building something for a kid to stare at that had no relation to the real world
- hn_ta456 3y ago
  Arguably most apps have a relation to the real world - chat and live video sharing, etc.
footy 3y ago
Is that really what's happening here though? Seems like the author is using the app with their toddler, and it's only a tool to do something in the real world. Kind of made me think of my dad teaching me to use a compass or looking at star charts with me in the early 90s.

renewiltord 3y ago

This is a terrific toy. Great work!

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you :)