ADSB Position Demo

This folder contains several items that together make a demo allowing you to track civilian aircraft and send that data in to RabbitMQ for processing, collation, and later central display.

There are several software products within this code base:-

• adsb-console-go - A standalone Go app, designed to be run on the receiver (Raspberry Pi or Laptop) that sends data to a remote RabbitMQ instance
• adsb-live-processor - .NET and Spring Boot apps that Listens to a RabbitMQ exchange for new aircraft positions, and updates a Live (60 second TTL) record in Redis per aircraft
• adsb-history-processor - Spring Boot app that listens to a RabbitMQ exchange for new aircraft positions, and updates a postgres database table
• aircraft-monitor - .NET and Spring Boot web apps that provides a rest endpoint (/data/aircraft.json) which pulls data from Redis on request, and a web front end (/gmap.html) to show collated aircraft position information
• aircraftui - ReactJS web application with the modern web UI

Note two of the apps above are provided with C#.NET and Java Spring Boot varieties to showcase the same patterns being ran with different application runtimes.

Live Demo

You can view a live demo of these apps here: https://aircraft.shared.12factor.xyz/

How can I add my own data to the global view?

Everyone can run their own receiver and contribute to the global map! If you're interested in this, follow the below steps.

First, contact Adam Fowler in the UK Modern Apps SE team adamf@vmware.com for a key so you can send data to RabbitMQ.

Buy a receiver

The code you will use requires a specific chipset, so not all DVB-T receivers will work. A good one is the NeoElec R820T2 SDR NESDR Mini 2 which is what I use. This is an inexpensive item that can be found easily online, including from Amazon.

Install receiver software - NEW APPROACH SINCE 25 Feb 2022

See the separate Ground Station installation guide on how to install the ground station client.

Running live-processor and aircraft-monitor yourself

DON'T DO THIS!!!

If you run a local copy then you will 'steal' messages from the central exchange unless you change the name of your queue in the adsb-live-processor RabbitMQ template configuration.

Running this app without modification will mean the global view will not list all aircraft, breaking the demo!!! So please DO NOT DO THIS!

Still wanna do it? Well...

1. Create your own Small Redis cloud 'smallredis' and Cloud AMQP 'surveil-amqp' services
2. Reconfigure your local adsb-console app to use this RabbitMQ URL, not the one provided by Adam Fowler
3. Edit adsb-live-processor/src/resources/application.properties and change the 'group' setting to adsbposition.MYOWNQUEUENAME and save the file
4. Run mvn package
5. Run cf push for the app. This stands up three copies of the processor (just to prove it can - doesn't require three copies, one will suffice)
6. Edit aircraft-monitor-java/manifest.yml To specify the app name of your choice (If pushing to EMEA, don't use the default!!!)
7. Perform cf push on this app
8. Bind both services to live-processor, and the smallredis service to aircraft-monitor, and re-configure the services
9. You will now see your own data, you anti-social person you, not wanting to share. Tsk Tsk ;o)

What is happening under the hood?

The basic outline is:-

1. Each aircraft transmits ADSB messages at varying rates and signal strengths on 1090 MHz. This uses the same transmission tech as Digital TV, allowing it to be receiver by cheap software defined radio TV sticks (ONLY IF their frequency range stretches to 1090 MHz)
2. A receiver hears the signal, and decodes the raw data, creating a full (including partial messages) output on the console, and exposing a JSON endpoint with the latest data on http://localhost:8081/data/aircraft.json or a local file in /run/dump1090-fa/data/aircraft.json
3. The adsb-console app reads this local data once a second. It drops data that has already been sent, and drops partial information data (data without a flight code or longitude and latitude), and sends the remaining data to a RabbitMQ message exchange
4. The adsb-live-processor app instance each listen to the same queue attached to this exchange, ensuring each message is processed only once whilst maintaining HA, and updates the aircraft's live view (a Redis object with the key as the flight code, and value as a JSON object). Each object has a time to live of 60 seconds, so aircraft that land or drop out of range of all receivers will vanish out of Redis after 60 seconds. Hence the name 'live view'.
5. The aircraft monitor app has a Spring based rest endpoint (at /data/aircraft.json for ease of memory) that scans Redis for all aircraft keys, and produces a combined JSON output
6. The web page of the aircraft monitoring app (at /gmap.html again for each of memory), queries this JSON endpoint once a second, and displays the global view on a map for you
7. The adsb-history-processor app also logs all data for each aircraft to a postgres/greenplum database

Sub project status

|Processor|Java status|C# status|Go status|Notes| |----|----|----|----| adsb-console-java|RETIRED|N/A|N/A|Please use the go version now adsb-console-go|N/A|N/A|Working|NEW! Works well, and has its own packaged installer adsb-live-processor|Working, multi instance|Working, multi instance|N/A|Takes live feed and sends to Redis adsb-history-processor|Working, multi instance|N/A|N/A|Takes live feed and sends to Postgres/Greenplum for later analysis aircraft-monitor|Working|Working|N/A|Aircraft REST endpoints (and older map display web app) aircraftui|N/A|N/A|N/A|ReactJS (staticfile buildpack) new demo web UI

REST API

The aircraft-monitor project exposes three REST API endpoints:-

1. /data/aircraft.json The 'live view' for all aircraft younger than 60 seconds (This is the only endpoint used in the web UI today)
2. /tracks/FLIGHTID/latest The latest historic position (may be in the distant past) for a given flight
3. /tracks/FLIGHTID/today The whole history of points for a given flight in the last 24 hours

License and Copyright

All code and material is copyright VMware, Inc 2020-2022 all rights reserved, and licensed under the Apache-2.0 license unless otherwise stated.

aircraft-monitor-java contains the web front end from mutability-dump1090 within its src/main/resources/static folder which is from the mutability version of the dump1090 application available at https://github.com/mutability/dump1090 and are licensed under the GPL V2 License. These files are copied verbatim and have not been modified, except the config.js file which is designed for user editable configuration.

Support

This app is provided as-is, without support. If you're using the internal pivotal demo app, then please email adamf@vmware.com with all relevant information and I'll endeavour to give you pointers.