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AboveBracknell

AboveBracknell is an ADS-B Twitter Bot running on a Raspberry Pi. It tracks airplanes and then tweets whenever an airplane flies overhead.

  • Uses tar1090 for ADSB message decoding, airplane tracking, and webserving.
  • It tweets an image of a map with the airplane's track.
  • It displays the flight name if available, or the reported ICAO code.
  • It displays altitude, ground speed and heading information of the airplane at it's closest point to the bot.
  • It displays the airline name and the aircraft manufacturer and type.
  • It displays the flight Departure and Arrival stations using Josh Douch's ICAO hex lookup APIs.
  • It adds conditional hashtags for aircraft departing or arriving locally at LHR.

The Raspberry Pi must already be running ADS-B decoding software. You can build your own using READSB, or many prebuilt images of these exist.

Preferred Prebuilt Option:

Other Options:

Example Tweets

Hardware

  • RaspberryPi - 4B recommended (2B and 3B will work)
  • 16GB minimum MicroSD card
  • RTL-SDR dongle (FlightAware Pro Stick Plus) - generic RTL-SDR dongles will work
  • 1090MHz antenna (FlightAware ADS-B antenna) - home-made "cantenna"s will also work

Dependencies

  • python3
  • Tar1090 (For ADSB decoding)
  • Pillow, Chromedriver and Selenium (To create screenshots)
  • Twython (to tweet messages)
  • emoji-country-flag (Tweet contains flag)

Also Requires:

  • aircrafts.json
  • operators.json

Both can be found at Mictronics.de under Aircraft Database. Use the Export function on the website and download the "old" database for readsb.

Install Instructions:

  • Clone the repository to the Pi
  • Copy the Config file to Config.py
  • Edit the Config.py file - add Twitter keys and change Lat/Lon as required
  • Transfer the aircrafts.json and operators.json files to the AboveBracknell folder.
  • Install Pillow, Selenum, Twython and emoji-country-flag using pip3
  • Install chromium-chromedriver using apt
  • modify Tar1090 /usr/local/share/tar1090/html/config.js file to set ICAO code to be shown by default (screenshot fails without this change)
  • run the runAircraftTracker.sh script file
  • when working, set a crontab @reboot sleep 30; /home/pi/AboveBracknell/runAircraftTracker.sh

Modified from

Contributors