We’ve seen all sorts of coolRaspberry Piprojects through the years that use matrix panels — from simple ideas like this snazzyPi-powered matrix dashboardto more interactive things like thisretro gaming matrixsetup. Today, however, we’ve got something entirely new to share that really shakes up what we’ve come to expect from these sorts of builds. Maker and developer Wesley G Mitchell has put together aRaspberry Pi-powered flight trackerthat outputs to a custom matrix display.
This isn’t the first Pi-poweredflight trackerwe’ve seen, in fact, we published a guide ourselves onhow to make a flight tracker with a Raspberry Piand an ADS-B receiver. Although, instead of using a matrix panel, Ryder took things a step further and projected the flight data onto his ceiling.
This project is far from plug and play. There were quite a few things that Mitchell had to tackle to get to the final design we see in the project thread. The matrix display is comprised of four separate panels, all of which are controlled by the Pi. On the screen, you may see nearby flights as they are detected along with their flight path data.
The final panel is big and looks nice with a dense resolution (for a matrix display anyway) that lets you clearly read the flight data. Each panel has 64 x 64 pixels, adding up to a total of 128 x 128px. Mitchell is using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this project but you could get away with using and older Raspberry Pi, or the latestRaspberry Pi 5in its place. A USB RTL-SDR dongle is used to retrieve flight information.
Mitchell was kind enough to make the project open source and has shared information about how he’s programmed the flight tracking matrix display, including a link todump1090which is helping read data from the RTL-SDR receiver. You can also find Mitchell’s source code for the matrix flight tracker over atGitHub.
If you want to get a closer look at thisRaspberry Pi project, you can check it out in detail over atReddit. Be sure to follow Mitchell for more cool projects as well as any future updates to this one.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
