ITItsMeDavidV·Jul 12, 2026
A few weeks ago I came across an ig post of someone that reflected ADSB data on their ceiling using a projector and a raspberry pi, essentially turning their ceiling into a radar. I’ll link it at the bottom. But anyways, I thought it was freakin awesome and it got the av geek in me kinda going, and I thought why not just do this with AR, kind of like those AR constellation apps. (TLDR; I wanted to try, but I don’t have a projector lol)
For context: I used to be a bit of an av geek when I was younger, used to fly RC planes and I even ended up going to Embry Riddle for AE for some time, but life went in a different direction and I ended up becoming an iOS developer.
Anyways so yeah, I built a rough proof of concept that same day and went to the roof and started spotting air traffic over my house. It was super fun, I actually was just tinker
Read the rest
ing with it for hours. I tried it on some flights I took that week and it was super fun. I saw so many different types of aircraft, I even saw known celebrity aircraft fly over me, I saw the US Sec of State fly over me after the first WC match in the US. So I said why not and decided to make a side quest out of it.
Building this for thee instead of me is a bit of a different undertaking so I ended up rebuilding it for production and polishing it up. Then just using it for the past couple weeks to work kinks out and refine. Tracking fast moving aircraft on AR that are relatively close to you especially when they are traveling laterally to your perspective is a whole different ball game then just tracking a plane in the sky that’s cruising at 30k when you’re on the ground. So naturally I needed to stress test this use case, as I knew a lot of potential users would prob be at the airport when using this, where there are a lot of low-lying, fast moving aircraft. But to take a flight just for this is expensive. Around the same time I saw the In-n-Out spot near LAX going viral for the A380s that regularly pass right over it just before landing. I had never been to LA before, so I said why not and flew to LAX just to goto that spot and stress test the low flying, close proximity use case. It did not disappoint at all. It’s literally just as good as in the viral clips. I was in heaven, my fiancé not so much, bc we literally spent hours there haha. I didn’t see any A380s pass over me, but it was still incredible (and I did see two at LAX). If you saw a dude with an iPhone connected to Mac on the ground working while planes chaotically flew over, last Monday that was me haha.
Anyways, I got a lot done there and I’m happy to say today I launched ARDAR. It’s completely free and has no Ads whatsoever for the time being, so I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do and maybe show me what you find in the sky?
PS here’s the ADSB projector project I mentioned if anyone is also interested in checking that out! (Kudos to that person for making such a cool project) https://github.com/cpaczek/skylight