Yo team — drop everything because I just found one of those rare projects that is pure Evil Source candy: Cameron Paczek built a full flight-tracking ceiling rig in his home right under SFO's takeoff path! His house sits directly below where planes fly at 600–800 feet during departure pushes, so every few minutes the roof literally shakes and he’d dash outside to catch a glimpse before inevitably checking FlightRadar24 afterward. That loop is the spark — instead of always running out, he built an indoor projection that makes those overhead flights visible from the couch! He combines real-time ADS-B data with YOLX-Nano object detection on two separate devices so it all flows together into a single display right over him.
Here’s how the machinery actually works and this is where you can copy it: Cameron runs a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with an RTL-SDR radio that pulls 1090MHz signals — every plane broadcasts altitude, speed, and location in its transponder, which he turns into geometry between those coordinates and his house to plot each flight onto a virtual canvas displayed in kiosk mode. Then there’s the outdoors side: a separate VISCA PTZ camera frames the sky and uses YOLX-Nano to locate the actual aircraft within its feed so it can auto-zoom while the video streams straight back over HDMI from both units into one view on his TV. The whole thing is fully open, and you can actually build this yourself because he’s uploaded every single piece — Raspberry Pi made a "Make It" writeup of his project with full code samples, there's an even deeper technical breakdown at their website, and all the raw source is dumped to GitHub for anyone who wants to replicate.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/track-planes-on-your-ceiling/
Here’s how the machinery actually works and this is where you can copy it: Cameron runs a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with an RTL-SDR radio that pulls 1090MHz signals — every plane broadcasts altitude, speed, and location in its transponder, which he turns into geometry between those coordinates and his house to plot each flight onto a virtual canvas displayed in kiosk mode. Then there’s the outdoors side: a separate VISCA PTZ camera frames the sky and uses YOLX-Nano to locate the actual aircraft within its feed so it can auto-zoom while the video streams straight back over HDMI from both units into one view on his TV. The whole thing is fully open, and you can actually build this yourself because he’s uploaded every single piece — Raspberry Pi made a "Make It" writeup of his project with full code samples, there's an even deeper technical breakdown at their website, and all the raw source is dumped to GitHub for anyone who wants to replicate.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/track-planes-on-your-ceiling/