Raspberry Pi PiAware Aircraft Radar

After creating the PiAware Flight Indicator LED I was keen to see what else I could do with the aircraft data my PiAware setup was retrieving for me.

I thought I would see if I could make an ‘old fashioned’ radar to show what aircraft were being picked up so I could have my own desk based radar.

I found an example of a radar written in pygame, which became the basis of my code (although I am pretty sure the original author wouldn’t recognise it now) and created a radar class.

I plugged in the GPS coordinates of the aircraft using the PiAware flight data class I created to produce a pretty swanky, even if I say so myself, radar of all the aircraft I am picking up signals from.

Setup PiAware If you want to have a go, first you need to setup a PiAware server to receive data - you don’t need a lot of equipment and its really easy to do.

Download my project The code is on githubat github.com/martinohanlon/PiAwareRadar.

git clone https://github.com/martinohanlon/PiAwareRadar

Run the program The program expects a number of command line parameters, the mandatory being the latitude and longitude of your PiAware server, which will be the centre of the radar.

cd PiAwareRadar/piawareradar
python3 piawareradar.py mylat mylon

You can set other parameters for the IP address of the PiAware server, if your radar is running on a different machine, whether you want it to run full screen and the layout of your screen (normal or touch).

Usage

    usage: piawareradar.py [-h] [--piawareip PIAWAREIP] [--screen SCREEN] [--fullscreen] lat lon

    PiAware Flight Radar

    positional arguments:
      lat                   The latitude of the receiver
      lon                   The longitude of the receiver

    optional arguments:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --piawareip PIAWAREIP The ip address of the piaware server
      --screen SCREEN       The screen config to use [normal / touch]
      --fullscreen          Fullscreen radar

The plus and minus buttons in the top right allow you to zoom in and out, if you click on a dot, the data about that flight will be display in the bottom right hand corner.