rpi-led-flight-tracker

Track the aircraft flying above you using a Raspberry Pi, RTL-SDR, and an LED matrix

Installation

• First clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/Weslex/rpi-led-flight-tracker && cd rpi-led-flight-tracker

• Install dump1090 and rpi-rgb-led-matrix

git clone https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 && cd dump1090
sudo apt-get install librtlsdr-dev
make
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix && cd rpi-led-matrix
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python3-dev cython3 -y

make build-python 
sudo make install-python
cd ..
mv rpi-rgb-led-matrix rpi_rgb_led_matrix

• Create Python Environment and Install Packages

python -m venv FlightTrackerEnv
source FlightTrackerEnv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

• The easiest way to configure the flight tracker is to modify "run_flight_tracker.py"

  • Set the display variables for your particular display
  • Set config.base_latitude and config.base_longitude values to where you would like the center of the display to be (location of the device typically)
  • Adjusting config.mapping_box_height_mi and config.mapping_box_width_mi to change the geographical area represented by the display.

• Start up dump1090

./dump1090/dump1090 --interactive --net

• With dump1090 still running, start the flight tracker (must be run as root)

sudo FlightTrackerEnv/bin/python3.11 run_flight_tracker.py