IN LAYMEN TERMS

My webcam aims at a dedicated portion of the Southern California sky. Knowing where that sky’s digital location is, in correlation with angle of camera, distance and public flight data. Passing planes flight information can be overlayed on the live video to be identified for each passing plane. Including 360° control the camera through my smartphone.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING

Planespotter runs on a Raspberry Pi 5, where a Python server pulls H.264 video from a TP-Link Kasa pan-tilt camera backdoor, through one ffmpeg decode. It polls the adsb.lol feed every 5 seconds for aircraft within 25 nautical miles, projects their positions onto the camera frame using a calibrated pan, tilt and zoom model, and matches them to detected motion so each clip is tagged with callsign, aircraft type, airline and route, and it can start recording before a predicted aircraft enters the frame. The same server exposes an HTTP API that drives a phone and web viewer with a live MJPEG stream, joystick camera control, zoom, a filterable events browser and setup tools, and it will also feed a planned Planespotter app as data, no video; on the Atlas T-Deck handheld.