We don’t know art, but we know what we like. And this gizmo by [Johan Kanflo] is right up our alley.
First, [Johan] gutted an old Macintosh Classic computer and stuffed a Raspberry Pi inside. Now this is not really a new idea, but [Johan] did a very nice job with the monitor and his attention to detail shows in the rebuilt floppy-drive eject mechanism. He gives it back that characteristic “schlurp” noise.
Then he outfitted the Raspberry Pi with an RTL dongle running dump1090 software to listen to the ADS-B radio signals. The data extracted from the SDR is piped off to an MQTT server with all sorts of data about the airplanes overhead. Another script subscribes to the MQTT topic and figures out which is the closest and runs an image search for the plane type in question, publishing the results back to another MQTT topic. One final script subscribes to this last topic and displays the relevant images on the screen. Pshwew!
The end result is a Macintosh Classic that’s continually updated with whatever planes are closest to being overhead. We’re not at all sure if this is fine art, or part of the useful arts, or maybe even none of the above. But we really like the nice case job and think that using MQTT as a back-end for coordinating multiple concurrent Python scripts (on the same computer) is pretty cool.
I figured there was some sort of camera on a gimbal that tracked the aircraft overhead and displayed an image of it. Turns out it just pulls an image off of a Bing search for the aircraft…
Would be nice though, a tracking camera system.
Ya, flaps & gear down @ 480 knots & 35000 Ft would be a bit unusual…
These days, you never know when you’re going to be forced to land.
No, the poor Mac Classic!
We can only hope it was either a completely dead unit or he had an empty case. It sounds like he appreciates the finer Macintosh points, maybe he’ll make it do the startup chime when it detects a new object although that would probably get annoying very quickly.