An LED panel that shows the aviation around you

[nocoiner]

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.

[filtinious]

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...)

[sokoloff]

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=...

[esseph]

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.

[thenthenthen]

Reminds me of the beautiful work by Quadrature, Satelliten, plotting overhead satellites on a physical map: https://2016.kikk.be/en/program/exhibition/quadrature

[dangus]

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

[cmiles8]

Nice job on this. I love a good builder project and the ESP32 is a great platform for these.

[CPLX]

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.

[cdfuller]

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...

[RankingMember]

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.

[donclark]

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?

[RankingMember]

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/

[kimos]

Love this. It gives me a great idea for what to do with my Tidbyt.

https://tidbyt.com/

[cptnapalm]

There's a flight path directly over my house. I'm going to see if my wife would be on board for this.

[dddw]

Ask nicely, but decidedly

[floydian10]

Awesome! I was planning to do something very similar to this. This is really useful

[vs4vijay]

I vibe coded something similar as PWA WebApp - https://huggingface.co/spaces/vs4vijay/skywatch

[SkyPuncher]

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.