Earlier this year, I became aware of a very interesting company called FlightAware which offers flight tracking of both private and commercial aircraft throughout the world. As part of its service,
Flight Aware relies a lot on crowdsourcing of its tracking data from thousands of private radio receiving stations that monitor the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) signals of any aircraft that are flying overhead.
These signals provide the GPS location, altitude, speed and direction of the aircraft, which can be easily received by a radio receiver and sent to FlightAware to provide real-time tracking.
The beauty of this arrangement is that this information can be received and sent by a lowly Raspberry Pi and a very inexpensive SDR (Software Defined Radio) dongle. This type of receiving station is more commonly known as a PiAware station.
Having a spare Wi-Fi enabled Raspberry Pi on hand, I was pretty intrigued by this and after ordering a $20 SDR dongle off of eBay, I was up and monitoring the airplanes in my area.
One of the neat features of the PiAware system is that you are able to see a real-time map of what your PiAware station is receiving via a web interface that you can view on a computer that is part of your WiFi network. As an added bonus, the PiAware web interface also gives a live weather radar picture for my area.
That's where there the inspiration for this project started. I also had a rather elderly Raspberry Pi 1 Model B kicking around. While the old girl was a bit slower than its newer siblings, it still had a lot of life left in it. As part of my investigation on what I could do with an old Pi - I stumbled upon some details on how you can use a Raspberry Pi as a web browser kiosk - similar to those that you see in places like airports to display up to date information.
And with that, the SkyAware Radar Kiosk was born.
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