We all got planes to catch (or track)

[foliveira]

Abstract

Many of us use planes as a common way of moving around. But most of us don't really know how an airplane really works. Over time I've grown curious about them and during the last years I started looking into a protocol used by airplanes that allows them to be tracked by ground stations.

Automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast, ADS-B for short, enhances safety by making an aircraft visible, in realtime, to air traffic control and other appropriately equipped ADS-B receiving stations with position and velocity data transmitted every second. Flightradar24 is a great example of a platform that uses this technology to show flights to their users on a realtime map overlay.

The goal of this talk is to explain how (and why), back in Lisbon, we built a receiver system using some antennas sourced from eBay plus a Raspberry Pi and Node.js and are right now tracking airplanes around the city airspace (and beyond!), the challenges we faced in building a platform that makes this data easily available for all to use and the awesome ideas we have for applications that we all can (and will) build on top of this.

Bio

Fábio is a programmer at heart who's always curious and eager to learn. He has worked on projects ranging from augmented reality stuff to realtime analytics products. For the past few months he has helped organise the require('lx') meetups in Lisbon and the NodeSchool Lisbon chapter meetings. In his list of interests one can find diverse subjects such has photography, Star Wars, cats and those machines that fly in the sky (commonly known as airplanes).

[SergioMSCosta]

Great stuff, Fábio!

[sericaia]

+1 :dancer: