Projecting the aircraft passing overhead onto your ceiling, in real time
Article excerpt
Skylight decodes ADS-B from a cheap RTL-SDR radio and renders the planes physically flying over you onto a ceiling-pointed projector. A jet you’d hear overhead glides across your ceiling at the same moment, labeled with its airline, type, and where it’s headed. Pure-black background so the projector’s rectangle disappears and only the aircraft (and […]
Skylight decodes ADS-B from a cheap RTL-SDR radio and renders the planes physically flying over you onto a ceiling-pointed projector. A jet you’d hear overhead glides across your ceiling at the same moment, labeled with its airline, type, and where it’s headed. Pure-black background so the projector’s rectangle disappears and only the aircraft (and stars) are lit.
It also draws the real sky behind the planes, sun, moon, bright stars and constellations, and live satellites including the ISS, all at their true positions for your location and time. Tune everything from your phone.
Features
Real-time overhead aircraft from a local RTL-SDR (sub-second), or from a free web API with zero code changes, handy for trying it with no radio.
Type-aware glyphs in a luminous, swept-wing style: widebodies tower over regional jets, helicopters spin their rotors, turboprops and GA aircraft spin their props.
Smooth motion, interpolates the ~1 Hz fixes to 60 fps by rendering slightly in the past and tweening between real positions (no teleporting).
Comet trails, altitude-graded color, and range rings + compass for orientation.
The airport (runways) drawn at its true position, so you watch departures and arrivals line up with the runway.
Window to elsewhere, each routed flight shows its destination city, local time there, and miles-to-go, plus a faint great-circle arc toward where it’s headed.
Live sky layer, sun, moon (with phase), bright stars + constellation lines, naked-eye planets, and satellites / ISS computed from TLEs. Scrub time forward/back from your phone, or jump straight to the next ISS pass.
Phone control panel, every setting (rotation, theme, palette, filters, sky toggles, …) is live-tunable over your LAN and persists across reboots.
Optional sky camera, point a PTZ camera (VISCA-over-IP + RTSP) at the sky and Skylight automatically films the planes it’s projecting: ADS-B-driven pointing with latency-compensated lead prediction, a hybrid vision system that locks the plane to center, and a confidence-gated zoom ladder that punches in as the lock holds. Includes a TV dashboard (/tv.html) with the live feed + radar inset, and a full debug UI (/tracker.html) with jog pad, target table, and a star-capture calibration wizard.
Appliance-ready, boots straight to a full-screen kiosk on a Raspberry Pi 5 (dual-output: projector + TV dashboard).
The project uses an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 and a RTL-SDR radio receiver dongle. The display is a native 1920×1080 projector.
It’s all under an open MIT License and the author is looking to crowdfund kits.
See the project and code on GitHub.