Summary
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This Raspberry Pi-powered skylight projects live flight data onto the ceiling.
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Use RTL-SDR or free APIs with Raspberry Pi 5, projector and HDMI to map live aircraft.
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GitHub offers complete instructions to recreate this fascinating real-time rooftop flight visualization.
It’s not every day I see a Raspberry Pi project that truly blows my mind. Fortunately, when those days do come, it’s because someone has built something that is genuinely and truly impressive. Well, it looks like today is our lucky day, as GitHub user cpaczek showed off his Skylight project, which streams live flight data to the ceiling so you can see what’s passing overhead. And I’m not even that fond of airplanes.
Skylight Adds Real-Time Flight Map to Your Ceiling
I could watch this for hours
You can see the project in action at post on reddit above. To start, cpaczek shows the real-life plane flying overhead, before ducking inside to show Skylight in action. They had set up a room where a projector projected Skylight onto the ceiling, displaying a real-time map of the airspace above their house. Sure enough, the map included a graphic of the plane that passed overhead, including details such as its flight identifier, type, and trajectory.
For such an amazing project, cpaczek is strangely quiet on the Reddit thread. There is no description, no story about how it came about, nothing. Fortunately, they were kind enough to leave a link to GitHub pagewhich contains everything you need to know to get it up and running in your own home. And why wouldn’t you?
The materials list seems very manageable for a project as cool as this. It looks like all you need is a Raspberry Pi 5, a projector that can be pointed at the ceiling, a micro HDMI to HDMI cable to connect the two, and an RTL-SDR Blog V4 to capture radio data from passing planes, although the project can also capture information from free APIs if you want to go that route. In any case, it’s a lot cooler than opening Flightradar24 every time a plane passes by.
