flightportal
Project for displaying the details of planes overhead on an Adafruit MatrixPortal and LED matrix
(video sped up to make the file fit, the speeds and delays are configurable anyway)
Uses an Adafruit MatrixPortal and a 64x32 LED/RGB Matrix (P4), and some fairly hacked-together FlightRadar24 API-style scraping to display the details of flights passing overhead. That code being unoffical, it may break at any time!
To make one you will need:
- A MatrixPortal (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745)
- A P4, 64x32 RGB matrix panel (I get mine from Aliexpress)
- The case I designed (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5701517)
- An adafruit acrylic diffuser (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4749) - available various places
- 6 M3 screws (sorry, said M5 before but was looking at the wrong ones, my bad. Think mine are 8mm long, little bit more would be OK, shorter probably a problem)
- Optional: Uglu dashes to stick the diffuser on, the case holds mine on pretty well though (https://www.protapes.com/products/uglu-600-dashes-sheets)
Prep the portal as detailed here (https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-matrixportal-m4/prep-the-matrixportal), put the code and secrets files on, put your wifi details and the geo box you want to search in the secrets file, and you should be good to go!
If you'd like to change the layout, colours or the flight info displayed, all that is pretty configurable, have a look at code.py. Hopefully the comments are fairly self explanatory if you're happy hacking around with python.
The libaries it needs are I think all part of the recommended prep above, but for info they are:
- adafruit_fakerequests
- adafruit_requests
- adafruit_bitmap_font
- adafruit_io
- adafruit_matrixportal
- adafruit_minimqtt
- adafruit_display_text
- adafruit_portalbase
For power, the easiest thing is to use the cable that came with your matrix panel, as long as it has two prongs that go to the screws on the matrixportal. All that's needed is for the portal to connect to the power port on the panel - we're not using much power here (I clock it at about 2w). Any decent usb power supply connected to the portal should do it.
I soldered a connection straight onto the panel's power port as below, for neatness, but that's completely optional.
For debugging, use putty or similar, see what COM port the portal is on (device manager in windows will show you), and run a serial connection to that port at 115200. It should print out helpful messages about errors, flights it sees, etc. You can also paste the URLs you see in the code into a browser and check you can find flights, etc.