tar1090-flightlogger

Python Flight logger for recording seen planes to a database

Why?

Thanks to wiedehopf and his repositories readsb and tar1090 I am running an ADS-B flight radar on a Raspberry Pi Zero.

While learning Python I have written a script for recording all seen planes into an SQLite-Database. Sometimes it crashed and only logged the transponder code of the plane. A second script run by a cronjob searched the web for more data like registration, type, airline and manufacturer, and updates the database.

With little knowledge and watching a course for object oriented programming I decided to rewrite my scripts. I integrated the web scraping.

I know this is not perfect. It helped me to learn Python and improve my skills.

Data logged

I logged basic information in the database:

• icaohex
• registration
• manufacturer
• type
• airline
• firstseen date
• lastseen date
• count

As this is hardcoded it needs some work to change it. I also change or add some data in airplane.py to have consistent data as not all sources use the same format or names for the manufacturer, the type or the airline.

config.py

In the config.py file some things can and should be configured.

    # URL of aircraft.json source file from tar1090 installation
    # see also https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090
        self.url="http://your-ip/tar1090/data/aircraft.json"
    # time to wait between URL requests in seconds
        self.sleep=30
    # request tries till timeout
        self.counter=10
    # Location of database file
        self.db="/home/user/dbname"
    # name of database table
        self.table="flights"
    # location of logfile
        self.log="/home/user/logfilename"
    # maximum lines in logfile
        self.loglines=500
    # log in db existing planes / True/False
        self.logexist=False

Running as a service

I run the script on my Pi as a service. See the service directory for the file.