Tie into https://www.flightradar24.com/ or similar to show the flight info of an aircraft that is flying overhead.
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Love this idea. I am a nerd and live on the LGA approach path so I actually have a premium subscription for Flightradar24. Will reach out to them and see how much it might cost to use their data.
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I’ve pledged for this specifically to display aircraft info. I’d like to stay involved in the discussions.
I wonder if the free data available with the FAA’s SWIM, or the data from https://www.adsbexchange.com/data/# will be valuable here.
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I looked into Flightradar24 some more and their business pricing isn’t terrible ($50/month). What’s not clear to me though is if Tidbyt, Inc., would be allowed to get just one business plan and then use it to provide a flight tracking app on everyone’s device. I’m trying to get an answer on that now.
Thanks for the link to ADS-B Exchange, I hadn’t seen that! I’ll reach out to them as well, they might be more our speed.
BTW, another thing to think about— what would we actually want displayed? Just from a design perspective and given that we’ve got limited screen space. Obviously could just show the flight number in giant text but I think we’d want more than that.
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I work at an airport, so I’d love to see the call sign and other pertinent data for the next aircraft to arrive or depart.
Other people may appreciate knowing the closest aircraft to their home or other geographic coordinates. That way when they hear or see an airplane out side their house, they can see at a glance what the call sign is, and perhaps their destination and aircraft type.
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Dan from ADSBexchange here… yes, we would love to get this working… I think there could be a few different types of widgets that would be useful.
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It would be really cool to show the flight status of my own flights too, for frequent travelers. It would be awesome if it integrated with one of the services for general personal flight tracking, like App in the Air. I’d love to see my flight status pop up in the hours leading up to it before I’m running out the door.
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Another request for this! I also backed the project with flights in mind (whether available as a feature or coding it myself!) so thrilled to see interest here
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I have a raspberry pi running piaware (flightaware ADS radio). I’d like to see that, but any flight feeder would be good. Great idea!
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Ideally there would be multiple fields that are user defined. The interesting data would be (imho):
Aircraft type
Flt. Number
Registration No.
Altitude
Speed
Departure
Destination
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Would like to stick together on this, whether we need to code it ourselves or not!
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Yes! Based on a proximity to a street address, lat/long, or home airport code…
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Not sure if possible but it could be cool to have the left 1/4 or 1/2 of the screen show an image of the aircraft or even an illustration (e.g. smaller plane for Regional Jets, larger plane for wide bodies, etc.) and then some combination of the information glowplug recommended on the remainder of the screen. I think origin, destination, aircraft type, flight number are a must. Ideally registration number, speed and altitude would be cool as well.
Love this feature request!
I love this idea. I often pull up the FlightRadar app when I see a plane overhead. At the bare minimum, I would want to see the Airline, flight number, where it is from and where it is going. Aircraft type would be cool as well.
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My Tidbyt is here! I really need to get this Aircraft identification thing working.
Hi Dan- Any more interest in getting this working on a Tidbyt?
Yes! I still don’t have mine though… 
OK, it just arrived today! I’ve been poking around with the dev tools.
I can “push” directly to my Tidbyt, which is easy, but if we wanted to write an app that allowed the user to specify a location (similar to the weather apps), how would we go about doing that?
HI Dan- I’m trying to get started as well, but running into issues as I don’t have a mac, nor do I have much experience with Linux/Ubuntu.
Once I can get into Pixlet, I’ll be able to dice into learning Pixlet/Starlark.
Conceptually, My friend and I were trying to longhand the process- We were tining that we’d need to pull aircraft operating close to a lat/long and then filter them by what’s available.
Could you provide a list of what fields would be available in an ADSBExchange? We’re hoping it would be an easy parameter to filter for, such as origin or destination. Otherwise, it sounds more complicated in that we need to make some assumptions based on the proximity of the aircraft to the airport, below a certain altitude, and in a vertical descent or climb to determine arrival or departure.
Was this the direction you were heading?
There are so many useful types of displays that could be done. Depends on what you’re looking to do. Currently, we do not have arrival/departure airports (just current lat/lon coordinates), but it’s looking like we will add arrival/departure airports shortly. My other interest is in aircraft flying around not on flight plans (medical helicopters, police helicopters, small GA planes, etc.) Pretty close to having something basic working here.
I am a bit puzzled on why Starlark was chosen as the development language here. There is not a lot of “googleable” material out there on Starlark and it doesn’t seem that well suited for this niche…
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