Just sharing a hobby project. Hoping to put a cheap amazon clip on x28 times lens to be able to get clearer photos.

Very simple prototype right now that I just 3d printed and wired up. The only things within range so far are pictured in the second photo.

Eventually I’d like to mount a weatherized version on my roof and get 360 degree coverage for plane spotting. The goal is to make it very cheap. This is the currently some cheap stepper motors, a Wyze cam v3, and a PI. I’m working on making it $50-100 total by hopefully flashing the Wyze cam directly and running the steppers off of its GPIO. Maybe an ESP32 if that doesn’t work.

Edit: Formatting and clarity

1) Spite art of livery of aircraft close to the set location.

2) Flap flip board for the Approach and Departures.

Free to ask questions.

Linking the GitHub repo : https://github.com/Jay9185/solidpixels-aviation.git

I run TripStow, a travel log that builds your trips from booking emails. For past flights outside the US, it works out the individual aircraft (the registration) by matching each flight to the adsb.lol open archive, so a big thank you to everyone feeding it.

A few things that came up, in case they are useful to anyone else matching against the archive:

- Ground coverage is thin at a lot of big non-European airports, so many legs have no take-off or landing, only cruise. Matching on callsign and time alone has to be careful.

- A plane that lands and leaves again unseen keeps the first flight's callsign in its trace for a few minutes. Splitting traces after 30 minutes unseen, then re-joining pieces with the same callsign over oceans, sorted it.

- Callsigns with a letter suffix (QTR10H, IGO11U) seen with no airports are often other flights. We only accept them when the aircraft type matches the booking.

- Codeshare numbers never show up; you need the operating flight first, and some airlines (Lufthansa, Etihad) fly alphanumeric callsigns like DLH7K or ETD6HZ.

The matched legs are published as open data (tripstow.com/open-data), as the ODbL asks. Happy to share more detail if anyone is doing something similar.

So previously one could get json for trace/trail of current flight for specific flight. Ie my adsb reciever notied an interesting plane and then I could the the history / trail / trace from adsb.lol for that specific flight. That is not possbile anymore since the page has some kind of challenge. Is there any other site where this is possible and allowed? I feed pretty much all sites.

I've been building a full-screen display of the planes over one area, meant to sit on a spare TV or an old tablet and stay on. Dark map, every plane nearby, and one big card at a time for a flight overhead: airline, flight number, type, route, altitude, speed, climb or descent.

Positions come from adsb.lol, with adsb.fi as the fallback, types from adsbdb. Routes come from the VRS standing data and get checked against the plane's position, altitude and heading. If a route doesn't fit, the card says "Route unknown" rather than guess. Some flights get a confirmed route from FlightAware inside a small monthly budget.

You can follow a flight and the wall tracks it until it lands, and it gives you a heads-up when a plane is about to pass close overhead.

It's been running on my wall in Jersey City (EWR, LGA and JFK traffic) and I want about 10 people to try it on their own screens next week. The beta is free. No account; your location stays in your browser.

I'd most like to hear from people who can tell me when a route or a type is wrong.

Waitlist for the invite (goes out Thursday 29 October): https://wingwatch.app

Happy to answer anything about how the routes are checked.