A hobby project for detecting flights that fly over user-defined geographic bounding boxes (e.g., my apartment) and displaying them on an RGB LED matrix.
Consists of a Deno server and a Python daemon that drives the LED matrix. The deno server handles serving a configuration UI (React), fetching and persisting the flight data, and communicating with the Python daemon.
When there are active flights inside the configured bounding box, the details of each flight are displayed one by one. Details include:
- Origin and destination airports
- Flight number
- Airline & callsign
- Aircraft model type
- Altitude
demo1.mp4
When there are no flights, the current date & time are displayed along with a reference airport's temperature and METAR (weather report). In addition, the Finnish electricity prices (pörssisähkö) for the next 8 hours are displayed as a scrolling list after the METAR.
demo2.mp4
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+
- 32x64 RGB LED Matrix from AliExpress
- Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet + 5V/2A power supply
- A wooden box
- Backend: Deno (using Oak framework)
- Frontend: React + TypeScript + Vite
- Database: SQLite
- LED Matrix: Python 3 with hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix library
The server polls for real-time flights and their details in a user-defined bounding box via unofficial Flightradar24 API. The data is stored in a SQLite database and persisted across restarts.
- Deno
- Python 3
- Raspberry Pi with a RGB LED matrix (or development machine for testing)
# Install Python LED matrix library
# Follow instructions for installing the Python bindings at: https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix/tree/master/bindings/python
# Install Deno dependencies
deno install
# Build the UI and serve the application
deno run build:ui
deno run --allow-all main.tsNote: building the UI with deno run build:ui can be a heavy operation on a Raspberry Pi and it might not even complete at all due to Pi's limited memory. You can alternatively build it on a more powerful machine and transfer the resulting dist directory to the Raspberry Pi.
Configuration of the server is done via the config.ts file in the project root.
Configuration of the client UI is done via the ui/config-ui.ts file. The UI configuration expects a Mapbox access token set in the environment variable VITE_MAPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN.
UI Configuration: Access the web UI to configure:
- Bounding box coordinates for flight detection
- Reference airport for METAR/weather data
- Display brightness
The configuration is stored in SQLite and persists across restarts.
MIT License