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FlightPortrait is two things. A frame: a battery-powered 13.3 inch color e-ink artwork that draws the aircraft that flew over your home. Six inks, no backlight, months on a charge. It hangs on a wall and once or twice a day the sky above your house becomes a new drawing. A network: an open source flight tracker built on community receivers, with a live map, per-airframe flight logs going back a year, and an open API. Anyone can feed it with a US$40 antenna. Anyone can run their own copy.

Where to start

The repositories

Everything here is backed by public code.
  • flightportrait/frame: the firmware, the device protocol, and a reference server you can run with nothing but Python.
  • flightportrait/network: the aggregation stack, the public API, and the web tracker, from the antenna’s Beast port to the map in your browser.
Questions these pages do not answer: [email protected]. We read every message.