cpaczek/skylight

Skylight turns your ceiling into a live map of every aircraft flying overhead right now. A cheap USB radio receiver picks up the tracking signals that planes broadcast automatically, and a projector pointed at the ceiling renders each flight as a glowing icon that moves in real time. You see the airline, aircraft type, and destination. The background is pure black so the projector's edges disappear and it looks like the aircraft are actually crossing your ceiling. Beyond aircraft, the project also draws a live sky layer behind the planes: the sun, the moon with its current phase, bright stars and constellation lines, and satellites including the International Space Station, all at their mathematically correct positions for your location and time. From your phone, you can scrub time forward to preview the next ISS pass, toggle any layer on or off, and adjust colors and orientation without touching the Raspberry Pi running the display. The hardware setup calls for three things: a Raspberry Pi 5, an RTL-SDR USB radio receiver with a small dipole antenna, and a 1080p projector pointed at the ceiling. The README notes that an expensive laser projector is not necessary. A basic native-1080p LED projector around $150 works well in a dim room because the content is sparse dots on a black background. The Pi boots straight into a full-screen display without a keyboard or mouse attached. You can try Skylight without any hardware at all. Running the project in its API mode pulls live flight data from a free public source over the internet, so you can see the display working in a browser on your computer first. Switching to the USB radio for real local reception requires installing a decoder tool called dump1090, which the included scripts handle. The project is built with TypeScript and React. Configuration lives in a single file and is editable live through the phone control panel. The README includes full setup instructions for the Raspberry Pi, notes on swapping in your local airport's runway layout, and a deployment script for pushing updates from your main computer to the Pi over your home network.