[robotastic]

Hi! I am the guy behind this, awesome to see it posted here. Happy to answer any questions.

To answer a question I saw pop up, I am using the FAA aircraft registration data to pull up the extra information about the planes. It lists who actually owns the plane, vs who is operating it. That is why you see so many banks. Places like Flightaware have much better data, but a pricy to look up.

[chopsuei3]

If you upload data with PiAware or something similar, FlightAware gives you an Enterprise level account, not sure if that offers API benefits though - https://flightaware.com/commercial/premium/#subscriptions https://blog.flightaware.com/201802-free-benefits-with-your-...

[robotastic]

oh yea! great point, I forgot about that. I am using PiAware to handle the decoding so I do have an Enterprise Account. I will have to check if I can make API calls for free.

[phita]

Unfortunately FlightAware Enterprise doesn't get discounted API access.

The FlightAware API I was using (they have multiple) didn't provide all the data I wanted either. The ADSB Exchange Rapid API was more comprehensive, but came at a cost.

The aircraft don't broadcast everything over ADSB - so these sites are all pulling from a database somewhere else. It appears ADSB Exchange and some of the pi based UIs use the tar1090-db. This was easy to work with and free - just need to update it periodically due to registration changes.

https://github.com/wiedehopf/tar1090-db

[ytjohn]

This is absolutely incredible. I have been wanting to do this as well, but I was going to approach it from the computer vision approach (blueiris and deepstack ai). Or a dedicated camera and pythoncv. I never even thought of having cameras move to match flightaware data.

A number of planes fly low and when I check flightaware, they're not on it. Or there's a plane that could be it, but it's flight path is heading East to West 30 miles North of me, while this plane came from the South heading North. Also, pretty much once a month or so, a pair of A10 Warthogs fly over or near our house. Last month, we had a real treat with 4 of them directly over the house, better than an air show.

So I'd like to setup 4 cameras on my tower focused skyward and have them try to catch clips of planes. I'll be looking at your work to see if I can also match those with flightaware.

[robotastic]

Doing a vision only approach would be really cool. A lot of the interesting planes do not have their ADS-B transponder on. The two systems could actually work well together. My system ends up generating a really nice, labeled dataset. I put some initial scripts / notebooks together for building ML models that can classify the different types of aircraft. https://github.com/IQTLabs/SkyScan/tree/main/ml-model/script...

[jhugo]

Since 2020-01-01, ADS-B is a requirement in a lot of US airspace (FAR 91.225). Turning it off is allowed for govt / intelligence / law enforcement / military only. Many countries have similar requirements.

People often think an aircraft is flying with transponder off because it doesn't appear on FR24/FlightAware. In fact these companies allow blocking aircraft from their service; this is why ADS-B Exchange is better.

[motohagiography]

Not a pilot, but played with ADS-B tracking several years ago, and my impression was below something like 4-5000' the transponder wasn't required to transmit location. This meant that surveillance aircraft (usually single engine propeller craft and helicopters) didn't send GPS, only the fact that it was in the air.

[jhugo]

Yeah. It's a requirement in a lot of US airspace, but not all airspace. Even at low altitudes it's required near major airports though.

Surveillance aircraft, if operated by a government entity, would not be required to transmit anyway. (Though they may choose to for safety purposes if it doesn't compromise the mission, just as the military often do in busy airspace.)

[Naracion]

If turning ADSB off is only allowed for government / military / intelligence airplanes, would using a CV algorithm to capture these airplanes be against the law?

Recently there was a post of Google satellite cameras capturing a B-2 Stealth Bomber showing up on Google Maps [1]. Would such planes be captured by a vision system only, and would that be of concern to the government that might be trying to keep it undetected?

1: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B001%2718.5%22N+93%C...

[brokenmachine]

I don't see a B2 at your link?

[Naracion]

Oh wow, they removed it. I apologize, I simply shared the link that had been shared before in December 2021. I should also have taken a screenshot.

Here is the HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29627105

Here's a Techradar post on this: https://www.techradar.com/news/eagle-eyed-redditor-spots-a-f...

[aqfamnzc]

In fact, ADS-B E has an option to filter only aircraft not shown on other sites :)

[mod]

I also have military planes flying over frequently. I live in the Ozarks, and they seem to enjoy flying quite low through the valleys.

I'm sure some people don't like the noise, but I love seeing the planes so close.

[punnerud]

You could use the ADS-B data for training your vision solution

[ruforrel]

Ok, so how long before someone looks at those flights, times and maps out your exact house address?

[devoutsalsa]

in grandpa voice

Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

[Stratoscope]

When I was a kid, nobody thought it was anything unusual to have a reporter from the local newspaper come out to your house and write an article with your home address and phone number.

And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!

I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.

[AnssiH]

Here in Finland the companies operating the phone books and directory services still exist, and you can still search people's phone numbers and addresses online or by calling/texting directory services - just no printed books anymore.

(and you can of course unlist yourself)

I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?

[prox]

In some places they even listed your job!

[dagurp]

In Iceland you can put whatever you want as your job title (or degree) so you have people calling themselves beefcakes, lion tamers, tetris players etc. It helps to see if you have the right person.

[capableweb]

In some countries, this is still true, with the addition of even your salary being public information.

[mastazi]

I didn't know about the salary, what country is that? I'm curious

[kqr]

In Sweden, any document touched by the government is by default open to the public, as an anti-corruption, pro-democracy measure.

Of course, your tax forms are documents touched by the government, in which your declared income is stated.

[capableweb]

Norway is one such country (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239) but I think some others in the Nordics also does the same, not sure exactly which though and Google is not being very helpful this evening.

[ehsankia]

Given that the image is cropped and it's hard to tell which part of the frame the cropping is for, I think you can easily guess which airport this is nearby, but definitely not at the house or even street precision.

[kylehotchkiss]

Scrambling the time a random amount each flyover could help?

[kqr]

Biasing by a constant amount might help.

The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly how many data points are needed to achieve a particular level of precision in the result.

[RealityVoid]

I don't think so. You only need 1 flight to locate him pretty accurately. If you do the thing you said, you'd need 2 flights along different axis to get a pretty good idea, with a larger amounts, you'd just improve accuracy a bit. Regardless, I think it doesn't matter. So what if they know where he lives, it's not like this sort of information is hard to come by anyway, and the risk profile of this is... not interesting, IMO.

[bambax]

It's somewhere south of Reagan DCA I think.

[jcims]

Your site got hugged to saturation but this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. I just got a sort-of ridiculous telescope (Celestron 11" SCT on alt/az mount, 2800mm focal length) and have been tinkering with ADSB for years. Can't wait to check out your work!

[robotastic]

That would be awesome! How fast can those mounts move? Would they be able to follow an aircraft? I have found that more zoom actually makes things a little tricker because you have to make sure it is leveled and aligned precisely. When my camera is fully zoomed, it has about 1 degree vertical field of view.

[mackmgg]

I've got a 6" Celestron, and I think it would be capable of following a plane that's sufficiently high up. It can slew a max of 5°/sec, so that would be ~500mph at 10000' or well over 1500mph at 30000'.

Because it's a telescope, it's designed to be aligned at night. It's more of a pain to do during the day (such as for an eclipse or I guess tracking planes). But there's no reason you couldn't align it to stars at night and it will its alignment pretty precisely. I'm not sure how much drift there is in that over say 24+ hours though. It's also smart enough with the Celestron controller to never point at the sun even during a slew. I'm not sure if it has that same safety feature when controlled from a computer, which would be a major concern with daytime use.

But a 6" f/10 (so ~1500mm lens) telescope with a full frame camera is still a 1° field of view so the same as you have now. Smaller sensor would be tighter field of view.

And of course the obvious drawback: None of this setup would be weatherproof

[robotastic]

That is interesting! There is this cool piece of software that looked like it helped with a lot of this. It did visual object tracking with telescopes... but it is no longer available: http://www.optictracker.com/What_is_it.html

Alignment has been a big pain for me. I might actually have to look at how to use stars to correctly position everything.

[FearlessNebula]

FYI if you were able to set this up, it would be trivial for you to share your ADS-B feed with Flightradar24[1]. This would give you a free business plan[2] for as long as you share, which would get you access to that data. [1]https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own [2]https://www.flightradar24.com/premium

[mike_d]

Instead you should just feed ADSBExchange, which doesn't require premium business plans or other nonsense. They also do not censor the data and will show you planes that the owners don't want you to see.

https://www.adsbexchange.com/

[globular-toast]

Back when I first discovered flightradar24 it seemed like every plane I was curious about came up on there. The curious ones are mostly military planes as they don't follow standard routes and schedules. Then more and more I noticed stuff not appearing. Later I discovered ADSBExchange and things seemed to be on there. But now, again, I regular hear military planes right over my house with not a thing shown on ADSBExchange. I don't think it's a coverage issue as I always see the regular boring cargo planes that come this way. Is it really "uncensored"?

[mike_d]

Yes it is uncensored. Starting in 2019, aircraft conducting operations related to homeland security, law enforcement, national defense or intelligence can turn off ADSB out and communicate their location to the FAA out of band.

[sklargh]

In sum, yes.

[yftsui]

Feed ADSBExchange does not have a good return, ADSBExchange have way less data available, they don’t even have a free iOS client. A single Raspberry pi feeds both FlightAware and Flightradar24, they give you free business plan with apps with good user experience. From a normal user’s point, don’t see a good justification to do so.

[busheezy]

If you set up an ADB, Flight Aware will give you an Enterprise account. FlightRadar24 also will give you a Business account. There is a docker image out there that will let you pump data to both services.

[chopsuei3]

Oops, just posted the same thing, you beat me to it, good looking out =)

Can you please share more details on that docker image setup?

[robotastic]

I have been using this Docker image on my Pi and it has been rock solid once you get it setup: https://github.com/mikenye/docker-piaware

[FearlessNebula]

Hah, you both beat me too it and I didn't realize until I posted the comment. Cheers

[mormegil]

For aircraft registration data, I think offline database download should be available without (paid) API access on some smaller services. I thought ADSBX was providing the aircraft database but cannot find it right now. Quick googling found opensky-network, but not sure how much is the database maintained. (Monthly snapshot keep being published, though.)

[cedivad]

Hey I wanted to add myself to the list of people that always wanted to build this but never actually did. I wanted to build my own servo gimbal with an old telescope though, you choosing a 30x ptz makes it much more reasonable. Well done!

[stefan_]

What did that camera set you back (or did you get it some other way)? Their page only says "Call for pricing", which usually means it's going to be outside my hobby budget hah.

[robotastic]

I managed to get it for $500 on ebay... but I just checked and it looks like similar ones are around $1000 now, so I guess I got lucky. An Axis PTZ dome camera turned upside down works great too though and there are a lot of those available on Ebay.

[dzhiurgis]

Do you know any similar cameras for even cheaper (i.e. cheap Chinese stuff)?

[robotastic]

In theory it should work with any camera the supports ONVIF, which is a standard for security cameras... actually, as long as the camera has an API you could probably get it to work. Since precision and image quality are important though, it could end up being more trouble that it is worth. You may have better luck trying to find a used one.

[b33j0r]

I had this exact idea and have been working on it. Have almost exactly your bill of materials. Glad to know there are others out there who find this interesting, great work!

I was always worried about making it a public data source. Kinda seems like it could be potentially dangerous, but that’s completely paranoid speculation. Thanks for sharing!

[b33j0r]

I should clarify that I’m mostly guessing on your bill of materials. There are only a few obvious choices for this project.

[robotastic]

I posted a bit more on what I am using on the About page: http://skybot.cam/about

I got all the camera gear on ebay, which was lucky.

I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't anything too crazy about making it public. I am also still trying to figure out if it is actually useful for anything... besides getting unlimited plane photos!

[notahacker]

> I figure since it is all based on ADS-B data, there isn't anything too crazy about making it public.

The only non-public information you're making available is the approximate location of your house!

It's a very high end approach to planespotting though. People used to just tick off serial numbers in books :D

[b33j0r]

I’m doing tensorflow on an nvidia jetson. Indeed, slowly. Thanks for sharing those details on your project!

[efreak]

Do some airlines not provide details, or is that some other issue? I'm seeing a flight 3C7601 that shows -1 passengers and -1 engines. Same for 4007f3 from British airways and 394a06 from air France. A8060C seems to have something in the way, it's just gray with a black stripe

[echelon]

You're the kind of hacker I would love to work with some day.

This is seriously one of the most fun and inventive projects I've seen. Such ingenuity at every stage of this pipeline. I didn't even realize they made cameras like this.

Bravo! Please keep it up!

[csours]

Awesome! I live north of Austin-Bergstrom and I quite often see planes on final approach. I've thought about doing this, and also trying to find a physical site for a telescope or telescopes to watch take-offs and landings.

[robotastic]

Let me know if you ever go down this rabbit-hole. Happy to give you pointers! You can get some pretty decent cameras off ebay for <$500. Since you are close you do not need much zoom.

[sklargh]

I live under KTEB’s most common departure procedure and very much want to integrate this with my current ADS-B exchange setup. Super excited to give this a shot, hopefully won’t freak out the neighbors too much.

[sydthrowaway]

Why dont you use motion sensing cameras? Could detect UFO

[gaetgu]

clouds, birds, leaves, etc.

[_yoqn]

• Clouds can be (mostly) ignored by contrast, shape, color • Eliminate all trees from the viewport • Birds would be an added bonus to catch!

[lifeplusplus]

would it be possible to pinpoint location of your house? Since we know the paths each of these planes have taken, public record, and although we dont know what time the photos were take we can still come up with range of locations vs time, where these angles would be possible.

so find intersection of all these planes' paths, then using geometry figure out possible locations, then find their intersections..

[Istribitel]

Did you present this at PyMNtos some time back? I love this project. It's fun to see it here!

[anonu]

So you snap a picture of the sky based on the adsb data? Is there any delay you have to work with?

[andreygrehov]

Very cool. To add some charm to it, set the title to UFO for the unidentified ones :)

[simonw]

This is such a cool hack, thank you for building and sharing this.

[johnflan]

Very cool, how do you get the camera to point to the right place?

[aimor]

What would you have to change to capture helicopters too?

[robotastic]

It should work for helicopters. In DC, alot of them do not have ADS-B and the flight paths are a little different, so I haven't managed to capture one yet though.

[coding123]

since it got hugged to death by HN can you post some pics?

[robotastic]

I just upgraded the App Service plan I was using... It should be back now for a bit.

[FearlessNebula]

It's back for me now as of 6:48 PM EST

[zyang]

Are you filtering out military planes?

[jhugo]

There's no reason to if they are flying with ADS-B transmitting. They're broadcasting their position and will usually appear on FR24 etc.

If they are flying without ADS-B (which is legal for the military when needed) they won't be picked up by this system so no filtering needed.

[btbuilder]

According to [1] it’s not just the military, but “U.S. federal, state and local government aircraft performing sensitive operations”

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/07/23/new-rule-allows-mil...

[jhugo]

Correct, GP asked about military so I mentioned that it's legal for them to turn it off. It's also legal for intelligence, law enforcement, etc -- anything government-related with a good reason pretty much.

[Lammy]

Phantom planes are also technically possible. One could even do it themselves using the "Havok" firmware for HackRF One. I won't link to it, but to quote its wiki, "Yes, it works. For real. If you want to try it out, DO NOT transmit on restricted bands and ESPECIALLY NOT on 1090MHz."

[phire]

Yes, 1090MHz is probably the stupidest bad to illegally transmit on.

Not just because of the potential safety issue, but because of how easy it is to track you.

In many areas, they have Wide Area Multilateration equipment installed that will show the real location of the transmitter, instead of the fake GPS coordinates you transmit. Normally it's there to double-check the ADS-B coordinates are correct, to track older planes without ADS-B, and to give true altitude readings, but it will track illegal transmitters as a side effect.

Even in areas where they haven't installed a permanent MLAT system, they usually have some sort of equipment that can track down a 1090MHz transponder. For-example, search and rescue planes often carry one.

[nojs]

Alternatively, you could use computer vision and only record the ones not transmitting - that would be an interesting data set!

[robofanatic]

Cool