More Projects; The Esp8266 Planespotter - Espressif ESP8266 User Manual

8. More Projects

In the last chapters, you successfully set up the development environment to program the
ESP8266 and got your first Internet-of-Things device running. While this chapter concludes
this Getting Started Guide I hope it is just the beginning of many interesting IoT projects you
will build.
A. The ESP8266 PlaneSpotter
The ESP8266 PlaneSpotter is an additional project that you can build with the same hardware
you used for the WeatherStation. After entering your coordinates it displays information on
airplanes which enter the airspace defined by your parameters. I built this fun project because
I see airplanes starting and landing from the nearby airport of Zurich. Since starting
FlightRadar24 on my iPhone is not nearly as nerdy as building a dedicated device I went to
work.
The PlaneSpotter uses the currently free API of adsbexchange.com to fetch information on
airplanes close to the given coordinates every 30 seconds. Adsbexchange gets its data from
hundreds of lowcost repurposed DVB-T dongles which receive the ADS-B signal transmitted
by aircraft. Since data coverage in my area was not so good at the time I built my own receiver
with a Raspberry Pi and a USD $10 USB TV dongle.
To build this project you can use the PlaneSpotterDemo which comes with the WeatherStation
library: File > Examples > ESP8266 Weather Station > PlaneSpotterDemo
If you want to try out the Platformio IDE there is also a separate project on Github:
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Blog Post: http://blog.squix.org/2016/07/esp8266-based-plane-spotter-how-to.html
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Code: https://github.com/squix78/esp8266-plane-spotter
The ESP8266 PlaneSpotter in Action