This is a companion application for an ADSB receiver running on a Raspberry PI such as PiAware, FR24 or similar (using dump1090-fa software).

This application turns a Raspberry Pi with UnicornHAT HD into a Radar Scope. The receiver's position is marked on the scope as a single bright white dot in the centre of the display, with aircraft currently in the range of the ADSB receiver placed around. The positions of the aircraft on the scope against the white receiver pixel correspond to the real GPS positions of the aircraft in relation to the real GPS position of the receiver.

The altitude of the aircraft on the scope is colour coded and the colour scheme is the same as in the case of dump1090-fa web interface (from lowest to highest these go: red - orange - yellow - green - cyan - blue - purple).

In addition, it is possible to add a static list of airports to display on the scope as well. These will be marked as dark gray dots on the display.

To use the application, it has to be running on a Raspberry Pi computer with a UnicornHAT HD (made and sold by Pimoroni). In addition, you need to have an access to an ADSB receiver based on dump1090-fa. It is possible that dump1090-mutability will also work, however I had no way of testing this.

Note: the ADSB receiver software can, but does not have to, run on the same Raspberry Pi as the PiRadarScope. In case it is running on a separate computer, all that's required is a network access to the http port on the ADSB receiver computer, and for the web server to be configured to provide the JSON files with aircraft and receiver data. On a default PiAware installation, the following two URLs are used (replace localhost with a hostname of your ADSB receiver):

• http://localhost/dump1090-fa/data/aircraft.json
• http://localhost/dump1090-fa/data/receiver.json

Additionally, the RaspberryPi needs to have the UnicornHat HD installed along with the unicornhathd Python module. Note, currently the older UnicornHAT has not been tested and therefore is not supported. It may work with only minimal code changes, so if you have one around, why not giving it a go?

Finally, all code has been tested with Python 3. It may work with Python 2, but YMMV.

The installation steps are as follows:

1. Install dump1090-fa based ADSB receiver. Make sure it's receiving aircraft and that you can see them in your web browser on the dump1090-fa web page.

2. Install UnicornHAT HD and accompanying software.

3. Clone this repository from github:

   git clone https://github.com/mkrzysztofowicz/piradarscope.git
   cd piradarscope

4. Copy the example configuration file radarscope.conf to /etc or your home directory (or any other suitable path)

   sudo cp radarscope.conf /etc/radarscope.conf

5. Copy the daemon file radarscoped.py to /usr/local/bin

   sudo cp radarscoped.py /usr/local/bin
   sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/radarscoped.py
   sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/radarscoped.py /usr/local/bin/radarscoped

6. Edit the /etc/radarscope.conf file to fit your environment. Refer to the comments in the example file for guidance.

Start the daemon using the following command:

sudo radarscoped -c /etc/radarscope.conf

NOTE: The above command should be issued with sudo, however the daemon drops privileges as soon as it starts to make sure it doesn't run as the root user.

To make the daemon start automatically at boot, you can use systemd with the included radarscoped.service file. To do so, copy radarscoped.service into /etc/systemd/system and issue the following commands:

sudo cp radarscoped.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable radarscoped.service
sudo systemctl start radarscoped

If everything worked well, you should see something similar to below: