Do you ever get tired of stressing your neck looking for planes in the sky? Worry not! Here is a neat and cheap Arduino/Ras Pi project to keep your neck sore free! [BANK ANGLE] presents a wonderfully simple plane tracking system using an affordable camera and basic microcontrollers.
The bulk of the system relies on a cheap rotating security camera that gets dissected to reveal its internals. Here stepper control wires can be found and connected to the control boards required to allow an Arduino nano to tell the motors when and where to spin. Of course, the camera system doesn’t just look everywhere until it finds a plane, a Raspberry Pi takes in data from local ADS-B data to know where a nearby plane is.
After that, all that’s left is a nifty overlay to make the professional look. Combining all these creates a surprisingly capable system that gives information on the aircraft’s azimuth, elevation, and distance.
If you want to try your hand at making your own version of [BLANK ANGLE]’s tracker, check out his GitHub page. Of course, tracking planes gets boring after a while so why not try tracking something higher with this open-source star tracker?
Thank you Israel Brunini for the tip.
Why add an Arduino? Could run the stepper drivers from GPIO.
In my setup the camera is far from the receiver, the receiver can be separated from the raspberry
Parabéns meu amigo, excelente idéia. Sempre pensei em fazer algo do gênero, mas minhas ideias sempre foram complicadas, em reconhecer o objeto a ser seguido. A sua ideia me surpreendeu pela criatividade.
Why not?
Separating the pi (placed where it’s covv bc eminent to use), and running a USB, or even just a regular serial connection across to the camera might be more convenient.
More hardware, more complexity. Basically unnecessary.
The camera itself has hardware to drive the motors, and a wifi interface. Could make use of that instead.
I tend to agree with you, it should be rather trivial to send PTZ commands to the camera, I could understand the choice if they were improving the tracking smoothness by driving the servo separately but it doesn’t seem like it.
Ah looking at their README they do seem to be driving the servos externally and I would guess the lack of smoothness is largely due to the frequency of ADS-B broadcasts, could maybe look at some software to fill in the blanks though, maybe even object tracking from the video stream as feedback once LoS is established. Now I just feel like I’m designing a weapon system though haha.
How long before someone straps a laser pointer to one of these things?
Probably way longer than it would take for them to be caught for doing so from what I understand.