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Displaying realtime tracking map/data/status on a Raspberry Pi screen

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  • Displaying realtime tracking map/data/status on a Raspberry Pi screen

    Hi

    As cute as we've got the Pi fr24feed tracker looking in the lounge, it would be kind-of nice to know what she's seeing without having to fire up mobile and looking at the dump1090 webpage.

    I'm thinking it might be fun to connect some sort of very basic, budget screen to the Pi and get it displaying realtime map/data? Even a basic 84x48 dot matrix LCD from eBay for a few pounds updating every couple of seconds could work, simply plotting the positions of planes seen using lat/long as X/Y position mapped to a basic bitmap and using the location of the receiver as the centre of the screen.

    Has anyone already done this? Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas, thoughts?

    I guess the important aspect for me is cost; it's easy to do this stuff (albeit anxiety provoking 'cos we're not rich) spending a fortune, but I find it far more fun doing this all on a daft cheap budget and DIYing it as much as possible, and also I'm unemployed at the moment too. Also, our fr24feed is running on just an old B+ and I don't want to do anything that'll create much load on the Pi. So a max budget of about £10 / $12. And yes, I'm fine with a soldering iron (or "smouldering iron" as my partner insists on calling it) and electronics and have some spare bits and bobs, components, leads and things (I used to run a set of 4 x 8x8 LED matrix displays on it but it was a bit much, a bit bright, and too attention grabbing really!)

    Warm Regards from a curiously hot and sunny Derby, UK
    Julie

    PS And yes, of course I'll post pictures and code and things if I get anything running.

  • #2
    You can use one of the many LCD displays available for the RPi (I have no real experience with them yet) and run the Raspbian GUI, then open a web browser and visit the web page served by dump1090 (127.0.0.1:8080 will do) I had the same idea, in fact I bought a Raspberry Pi 7" LCD with case for this project, bay had not enough time to advance. It would be nice to have a local copy of the map background, so not to need an internet connection all the time, automate the sequence of 1) login, 2 GUI start, 3 opening web browsee with the abovementined local web page. 1) and 2) are easy by Raspberry Pi configuration / preferences; 3) needs a little more work.
    An important warning: the web browser will "eat" RAM space and, after some hours, ths shortage of available RAM will make your RPi crash. It happened many many times here. You can add a crontab based script which reboots the RPi every 6 hours or so, the service interuption will last just a couple of minutes.
    Hope it helps.
    T-SABE8 - Raspberry Pi + RTL2832U / R820T USB + dump1090

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