If you like this, you’d probably really enjoy the hobby of ADS-B tracking. If you have a spare Pi sitting around, you can get an SDR and decent starter antenna for under $100. It’s also a fun entry point into other radio and satellite stuff. Airplanes.live is a good place to start.
I'm often awoken by aviation flying over South East London at 6AM in the morning. This might be a good thing to look at during those times...
(I wear earplugs and have double glazing, but the noise is deep and penetrating. I wonder how many other hundreds of thousands of people are also disturbed by early morning planes...)
Thanks, that is helpful. I can see from it there's lots of plane traffic flying just south of the river, from East to West, into Heathrow airport, from 5am onwards.
When I was visiting Jerusalem in 2001 I got used to the sound of what was apparently helicopter gunships firing on... I dunno, something, off in the distance.
Definitely not the same as sleeping under an F16 or whatever, but it's amazing what we can get used to.
Fun project! I've been slowly working at something similar that pulls tail numbers of overflying planes, grabs an image of the actual plane from jetphotos, and displays it along with flight info on a little LED screen.
Very cool project. I would like a text message or a log that I could go to with timestamps and aircraft details along with the date. Is there such a service or app?
Are you looking for a log of planes that have overflown your location or something else? You can see historical info via the history function on https://globe.airplanes.live/
That is a great live service. Thank you for sharing. We live near an airport/military and often hear loud or low flying aircraft and wonder exactly what it was. My question is if there is a log for my area that I could search by approximate date/time to try to identify the aircraft.
Yep! The interface icons are a little cryptic, but if you click the little icon in the upper right that looks like a play button surrounded by a reversing arrow, that will bring up an interface at the bottom to specify the date and time you want to see the history for. Click the "pause/unpause" button and it'll play back the activity at the speed you set so you can see all the planes that overflew at that time.
I would venture that once you had this reference to look up, you will be able to start identifying the planes by sound alone. Lots of grease monkeys can ID a car by its sound. Some are more obvious than others. I can easily tell when the dual rotor Chinook flies over compared to other helicopters.
Really cool project, though I’d recommend going with 3 or 4 64x64 LED matrix panels instead of 20 16x16 panels since it’s a lot less work with assembly and wiring and the end result is the same.
There are also pre-built LED matrix controller boards including an existing drawing library like the Interstate75 which I can recommend.
Holy crap! I’ve been considering nearly the exact same project.
We live under the flight path for the local airport. I’ve wanted to build exactly this. Like, literally exactly this. This is just way more polished than I could have built.
Future product would be cool to stick this behind a mirror to make it a bit more interior decor approved.
I wonder how hard it would be to combine this with a camera and some kind of image processing to actually create a live view video of the adjacent window with the planes annotated. That would be like the world’s coolest screen saver.
Awesome! I was planning to do something very similar to this. This is really useful
If you like this, you’d probably really enjoy the hobby of ADS-B tracking. If you have a spare Pi sitting around, you can get an SDR and decent starter antenna for under $100. It’s also a fun entry point into other radio and satellite stuff. Airplanes.live is a good place to start.
Reminds me of the beautiful work by Quadrature, Satelliten, plotting overhead satellites on a physical map: https://2016.kikk.be/en/program/exhibition/quadrature
I'm often awoken by aviation flying over South East London at 6AM in the morning. This might be a good thing to look at during those times...
(I wear earplugs and have double glazing, but the noise is deep and penetrating. I wonder how many other hundreds of thousands of people are also disturbed by early morning planes...)
For this situation, it’s not clear that a live display is more helpful than a replay of ADS-B data that you could explore later.
Something like: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2025-12-01-16:38&lat=...
Thanks, that is helpful. I can see from it there's lots of plane traffic flying just south of the river, from East to West, into Heathrow airport, from 5am onwards.
For much of a year I slept at the end of a runway in a combat zone in Iraq and used to hear all the jets take off with full afterburner.
I got to the point I just slept through it.
When I was visiting Jerusalem in 2001 I got used to the sound of what was apparently helicopter gunships firing on... I dunno, something, off in the distance.
Definitely not the same as sleeping under an F16 or whatever, but it's amazing what we can get used to.
Nothing like the smell of murder and oppression in the morning!
Love this. It gives me a great idea for what to do with my Tidbyt.
https://tidbyt.com/
Fun project! I've been slowly working at something similar that pulls tail numbers of overflying planes, grabs an image of the actual plane from jetphotos, and displays it along with flight info on a little LED screen.
Nice job on this. I love a good builder project and the ESP32 is a great platform for these.
Very cool project. I would like a text message or a log that I could go to with timestamps and aircraft details along with the date. Is there such a service or app?
Are you looking for a log of planes that have overflown your location or something else? You can see historical info via the history function on https://globe.airplanes.live/
That is a great live service. Thank you for sharing. We live near an airport/military and often hear loud or low flying aircraft and wonder exactly what it was. My question is if there is a log for my area that I could search by approximate date/time to try to identify the aircraft.
Yep! The interface icons are a little cryptic, but if you click the little icon in the upper right that looks like a play button surrounded by a reversing arrow, that will bring up an interface at the bottom to specify the date and time you want to see the history for. Click the "pause/unpause" button and it'll play back the activity at the speed you set so you can see all the planes that overflew at that time.
I would venture that once you had this reference to look up, you will be able to start identifying the planes by sound alone. Lots of grease monkeys can ID a car by its sound. Some are more obvious than others. I can easily tell when the dual rotor Chinook flies over compared to other helicopters.
There's a flight path directly over my house. I'm going to see if my wife would be on board for this.
Ask nicely, but decidedly
I vibe coded something similar as PWA WebApp - https://huggingface.co/spaces/vs4vijay/skywatch
Really cool project, though I’d recommend going with 3 or 4 64x64 LED matrix panels instead of 20 16x16 panels since it’s a lot less work with assembly and wiring and the end result is the same.
There are also pre-built LED matrix controller boards including an existing drawing library like the Interstate75 which I can recommend.
https://github.com/pimoroni/interstate75
Holy crap! I’ve been considering nearly the exact same project.
We live under the flight path for the local airport. I’ve wanted to build exactly this. Like, literally exactly this. This is just way more polished than I could have built.
Future product would be cool to stick this behind a mirror to make it a bit more interior decor approved.
I wonder how hard it would be to combine this with a camera and some kind of image processing to actually create a live view video of the adjacent window with the planes annotated. That would be like the world’s coolest screen saver.
I've seen this done a few different times. FlightRadar24 has a 24/7 livestream in Las Vegas that tracks and annotates them.
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/inside-flightradar24/live...