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Depending on when you grew up, you may have owned (or wanted) a projector that lit up your bedroom ceiling with a starry sky. Technology has evolved by leaps and bounds in recent years, and you can now use a Raspberry Pi to project much more than just simulated stars. Skylight, as it’s called, is a fascinating project from GitHub user cpaczek that projects onto your ceiling the real-time (more or less) positions of planes as they fly over your house. And you thought a project that made your smart home even smarter was impressive.
The system works by connecting a Raspberry Pi to an RTL-SDR radio, which decodes aircraft automatic dependent surveillance broadcasts – how planes determine their location. Using this data, Skylight can also project the airline, model and destination of each plane. Why would you need this information? For starters, it shows you how planes work, but also, hypothetically, if you hear something flying overhead and the information doesn’t appear, you may have spotted a drone instead of a plane.
This ingenious system has also been programmed with the ability to see a live or time-lapse view of the night sky. Using all the data collected by the project, it can display comet trails, bright stars and planets, and even the position of satellites and the International Space Station. And you can use your phone to control various settings, such as speeding up a time frame to see when certain satellites were overhead.
How to configure Skylight
At the time of writing, cpaczek promises to make a ready-made Skylight kit that will be sold through crowdfunding platforms. In the meantime – or if you want to save money – you can build your own. For this project, you only need five items: an RTL-SDR Blog V4 radio, a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB), a 1080p projector, a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, and a rotating projector stand. Cpaczek recommends a Yaber Buffalo Pro U9, which you can buy on Amazon for less than $90, but any can work as long as it has a quiet fan, an HDMI input, and a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. If you want to film aerial aircraft, you’ll also need an optional aerial camera — cpaczek recommends a VISCA-over-IP PTZ with RTSP. Unfortunately, even the most powerful Raspberry Pi accessories won’t work in their place; only third-party components will work.
Once you have all the necessary equipment, download all the necessary data from the Skylight page on GitHub, which includes a complete walkthrough of how to flash your Raspberry Pi with code. You can configure your personal Skylight in several ways. For example, if you prefer to run the projector from a server, you won’t need a Raspberry Pi, but you will need alternative code and configuration steps (which are provided). Once you’re done, you can look up and enjoy the beautiful night sky, even indoors.
