Do you want to build your own FlightAware PiAware ADS-B Ground Station?
Posted on 08/27/2015 6:49:38 PM PDT by markomalley
“Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”
The girl points down to a small box with a few wires coming out.
“I can bring up a web browser, and take photos inside grandpa’s house. Has he moved his coffee cup today? Is the telly on? At least then we’ll know he’s okay. And I can even type messages” - she changes focus to a textbox inside a web form - “that show up on top. We used ImageMagick for that part...here, you can see it in our code.”
Fingers fly across the keyboard, and now I’m reading the source code for an index.php page, another marriage of convenience between HTML and PHP. How’d this girl - all of eleven years old - learn to do this?
“A lot of it was trial and error.” Both she and her project partner blush a bit. “The PHP bits were kinda hard. But we found a lot of stuff on Google,” she confides.
After assuring her that grownups also find answers to their coding problems on Google, I had a good look at the code. Nothing spectacular, but readable enough.
Neither girl had written a line of code before this. They knew nothing about how to build a computer-controlled camera, or drive a computer-controlled display. But with Google’s help - and Raspberry Pi - they prevailed.
When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest.
At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups - eager for the respect of their peers - shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
I was one of the lucky few who got their hands on one of the first Raspberry Pis to hit Australian shores. That first Pi gave me all sorts of ideas of a world where powerful computers had become cheap enough to put almost anywhere. It’s giving kids the same ideas.
For the last few years I’ve been a judge for Young ICT Explorers, a nationwide competition and celebration of kids who get bitten by the IT bug. Back in 2013, we saw a range of web-based projects, with one or two Arduinos thrown into the mix. Last year, a few more Arduinos, and a single Raspberry Pi project. That project - with the most sophisticated crontab I’d ever seen, and also built by an 11 year-old - won the big prize.
This year, that project would barely rate.
Look here, these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there - because sometimes the referees miss goals - a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.
Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits - a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things - until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat. (Their inspiration was a teacher who’d gotten sick from bad sushi.)
Each of these projects solve a real-world problem. They’re not speculative: they’re prototypes. The Raspberry Pi has proven to be more than just a way to get kids into IT. It’s broadened their canvas of possibilities. They can look at a problem, dream up a solution, and make it so.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote that kids, raised in an era of pervasive interactivity, would expect the entire world to interact with them. I hadn’t realised we’d give those kids the capacity to create the world. But that’s where we are now.
Completely at home with Raspberry Pis, these kids Google around for the things they don’t know how to do - because when you’re 11, you don’t know what you can’t do. They are inventing the future, and for them it’s just child’s play. ®
It’s pretty amazing. I have one here at the house that I use for ham radio projects, and I use them at work (I’m an electronics and RF engineer) to quickly prototype stuff, without having to build a circuit board first.
>>> What are you running for an OS? <<<
Something called ‘Raspbian’ that’s a specific version of Debian which is some kind of Unix stuff.
I’m an old DOS guy who used to program in Q-BASIC and MASM before Windows, and this is my first sortie into the Unix world so I don’t know diddly about it. Just that there are upgrades about once a week...
The native programming language is Python but I haven’t put any effort into working with it.
Very popular with the emulation crowd as well.
You can run gameboy, nintendo, genesis, etc emulators on it.
raspberry pi bookmark
That was kind of a half-assed answer. I’ve been up since 3 am and I’m kind of crashing at the moment.
There are multiple systems available for Pi at least one of which (that I can’t think of the name of) is intended for operating audio-visual systems that might be what you need for your application.
Start at the Raspberry Pi website and then go from there. I’m pretty sure someone has already done something similar that might get you off to a good start.
Yes indeed. I put tiny Linux on on of those itune devices with Doom installed. I could play the game by rolling the round touchpad. Very minimalist, but lot of fun!
Radio Shack stores (what stores are left) have a “maker” section with Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. You can see lots of clever applications at Maker Faires and in http://www.makershed.com/.
Ping
Yeah, I would be similar to an industrial controller, but the final product I’m thinking of is more along the lines of home entertainment. This is just the guts of the final things I’m thinking of, there are some other parts involved too.
Anyway, it should be fun to play around with even if I can’t get the thing to work, I figure.
Yeah, I would be similar to an industrial controller, but the final product I’m thinking of is more along the lines of home entertainment. This is just the guts of the final things I’m thinking of, there are some other parts involved too.
Anyway, it should be fun to play around with even if I can’t get the thing to work, I figure.
I know that RaspPi can run gentoo, and even under Raspberian, the services that I have in mind are considered "basics."
“It better be made w/ Wild Maine Blueberries!”
+1!
I've never messed with one, but I've got a project i've been thinking of trying to do using one.
Do you know if it has drivers to read the data stream from a USB camera?
Do you want to build your own FlightAware PiAware ADS-B Ground Station?
lol
ping
Don't want to burst your innovation/entrepreneurial bubble but that's done everyday using Pi and others in the world of R/C, especially multirotors with gimbals.
Raspberry Pi
The kind you find at a second-hand store...
Raspberry Pi 2. Lotsa fun. Add the camera module and install VLC, and instant live streaming video (set it up to watch the hummingbirds). Might do some Christmas light animation. Got one for brother’s kid - he got excited about the Python possibilities; he’s having a fun summer with it.
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