Raspberry Pi ADS-B receiver Notificator

I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi with a RTL-SDR USB adapter for a while to capture ADS-B signals from the airplanes that flies over my home. I has been laying on top of my computer with a really bad antenna installation and sent it´s captured data to http://flightradar24.com/

The other day I thought of the installation and that i don´t in a easy way can see if it receives any data, well I can log in to flightradar24 and look at my stats or i can open a telnet session to port 30003 to see the captured data. But it wold be more fun get a more ping notification, when it accuracy hears something.

And what is more rewarding than a blinking LED, that sends it’s blue shimmer in the room.

So i wrote a small Python script that makes a socket connection to the localhost:30003 port, and if it sees some data on the port it blinks a LED. The LED is connected via a 220Ω resistor between ground and GPIO-18.

If you want to see my not so good statistics you can find them here

The small python code can be found on Github.

And if you want to run your own ADS-B receiver, there are a ton of information on the Internet. A good starting point is the Flightradar24 website.