AboveBracknell

AboveBracknell is an ADS-B Twitter Bot running on a Raspberry Pi. It tracks airplanes and then tweets whenever an airplane flies overhead.

• Uses tar1090 for ADSB message decoding, airplane tracking, and webserving.
• It tweets an image of a map with the airplane's track.
• It displays the flight name if available, or the reported ICAO code.
• It displays altitude, ground speed and heading information of the airplane at it's closest point to the bot.
• It displays the airline name and the aircraft manufacturer and type.
• It displays the flight Departure and Arrival stations using Josh Douch's ICAO hex lookup APIs.
• It adds conditional hashtags for aircraft departing or arriving locally at LHR.

The Raspberry Pi must already be running ADS-B decoding software. You can build your own using READSB, or many prebuilt images of these exist.

Preferred Prebuilt Option:

• ADSB Exchange

Other Options:

• PiAware by FlightAware
• FlightRadar24

Example Tweets

Hardware

• RaspberryPi - 4B recommended (2B and 3B will work)
• 16GB minimum MicroSD card
• RTL-SDR dongle (FlightAware Pro Stick Plus) - generic RTL-SDR dongles will work
• 1090MHz antenna (FlightAware ADS-B antenna) - home-made "cantenna"s will also work

Dependencies

• python3
• Tar1090 (For ADSB decoding)
• Pillow, Chromedriver and Selenium (To create screenshots)
• Twython (to tweet messages)
• emoji-country-flag (Tweet contains flag)

Also Requires:

• aircrafts.json
• operators.json

Both can be found at Mictronics.de under Aircraft Database. Use the Export function on the website and download the "old" database for readsb.

Install Instructions:

• Clone the repository to the Pi
• Copy the Config file to Config.py
• Edit the Config.py file - add Twitter keys and change Lat/Lon as required
• Transfer the aircrafts.json and operators.json files to the AboveBracknell folder.
• Install Pillow, Selenum, Twython and emoji-country-flag using pip3
• Install chromium-chromedriver using apt
• modify Tar1090 /usr/local/share/tar1090/html/config.js file to set ICAO code to be shown by default (screenshot fails without this change)
• run the runAircraftTracker.sh script file
• when working, set a crontab @reboot sleep 30; /home/pi/AboveBracknell/runAircraftTracker.sh

Modified from

• ha7777

Contributors

• Kevin Brandon
• Joseph Prochazka
• ha7777
• shbisson