Show Aircraft Near Me

piAwareOverhead is a little project I built for anyone who’s ever looked up at the sky and wondered what plane just flew by. It grabs live aircraft data from a local PiAware server and then checks the OpenSky Network API to figure out the tail number. Once it knows the plane, it opens a real photo of that exact aircraft in your browser. You actually get to see the plane that’s flying near you, which makes following air traffic way more tangible and exciting. I built this project because I love combining automation, real-world data, and a touch of playfulness. The script handles all the messy parts, like fetching data, checking coordinates, and opening Firefox with Selenium so you can see the image instantly. I even figured out a way to skip keeping a huge local database of tail numbers by querying the OpenSky API on the fly.

piReplay

piReplay This project is all about recording and replaying RF signals using a Raspberry Pi, rtl_sdr, and rpitx. It lets you capture radio signals from a specific frequency and then replay them as RF transmissions. What’s cool is that it turns a Raspberry Pi into a little radio lab where you can experiment safely with signal capture and replay. The script automates much of the process (primarily for dependencies), so you can focus on learning and testing rather than dealing with setup headaches. I built this because I figured I would forget how I previously set it up. I use this project a lot of the time as I recorded the signal for my garage door and hooked up a Pi to Termux on my phone with Wireguard to open and close my garage door from my phone. Using rpitx with an RTL-SDR dongle and a simple wire antenna, you can see how signals are captured, processed, and transmitted. Ultimately, I got a few scholarships, research grants that were pursued by Space Force, and of course this amazing experience.

(Screenshots are from UniversalRadioHacker for better visualization)