Colin Waddell did a whoopsie and moved into a new house directly under a flight path from the local airport. He decided to lean into it and created this Raspberry Pi-powered flight tracker so he and his wife can look at the fridge and put a name to the rumbling flights overhead.

It’s a nice chunky build so it makes for a striking addition to Colin’s fridge. He programmed it to display the date, time, and temperature when there are no flights overhead, so it doesn’t become a boring lifeless black square at any point.

How does it work?

A Raspberry Pi runs the FlightRadar24 live flight tracking software. Data is pushed to the Adafruit LED panel via an Adafruit HAT designed especially to help Raspberry Pi boards talk to its nice LED displays. Here is the source code if you want to build your own. Colin added a scrolling feature so that the make and model of the plane scroll along the bottom of the display underneath the flight details, as well as some shapes and lines to space out the information nicely and make it easier to read.

Parts list:

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
•  32×64 Adafruit RBG LED panel
• Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet for Raspberry Pi
• 5V power supply (with the cable switched out for a nicer-looking one)
• LED and current limiting resistor

The electronics were chosen partly due to their size, as Colin wanted the box to be as slim as possible.

Sleek design

Colin designed a custom box around Adafruit’s 32×64 LED panel and found a local carpenter to make his Adobe Illustrator dream a reality. The focus is on the screen itself, with a only a single — and fancy — cable to distract from the display and a nicely chosen retro-looking toggle switch on the top.

Be friends with Colin

Here is the original project post on Colin’s blog. Give it a click to make Google like him. You can also find him on Instagram as @MrWarmToast. We’re big into being friends with Colin because he moved into this new house during lockdown when no one flew anywhere, so the flight path bother didn’t reveal itself until it was much too late. Way to make lemonade, Colin.