Flight watch
By Rob Zwetsloot. Posted
As we often mention in the pages of the magazine, folks often email us with information on projects they’ve made. This one tickled us – bored with checking a website to figure out what planes were flying overhead, maker Robin Shand made a watch to check the flights of course.
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“Since starting work in the defence sector, I’ve taken more of an interest in aircraft, especially what’s been flying overhead from the nearby MOD bases from my house,” Robin says in his email. “I was always checking flightradar24 out of curiosity and this project was an attempt to bring that capability into a simple, wearable device.”
Basically, the watch locates the wearer and shows them the nearest aircraft on the e-paper display. Robin explains it works thus:
- Built on a Raspberry Pi Zero running a Python script
- Uses an on-board GPS module to determine location
- Sends coordinates via a 4G LTE connection to the OpenSky API to identify nearby aircraft
- Enhances flight data (origin/destination) using AeroAPI
- Displays key flight details on an e-paper screen, refreshing every minute to balance performance, API usage, and battery life
“To make it fully portable, I designed and 3D printed the case from scratch and packed in a 5000mAh battery,” he adds. “This gives it at least 12 hours of runtime (all I’ve tested so far).”
It is extra funny to us that it also does not tell the time. Beautiful, an excellent project, we love it anyway.
Rob is amazing. He’s also the Features Editor of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, a hobbyist maker, cosplayer, comic book writer, and extremely modest.
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