Introducing Pi-Sky

Pi-Sky is a real-time flight-tracking web UI for the Raspberry Pi.

Aircraft broadcast ADS-B messages on 1090 MHz, often several times per second, carrying basic information about each flight, including:

ICAO address: a unique hex identifier for that aircrafts transponder.
Callsign: the flight ID (e.g. airline + flight number), when set.
Position: latitude and longitude from the aircraft’s GPS.
Altitude: pressure altitude.
Speed and track: ground speed and the direction the aircraft is moving over the ground.
Vertical rate: climb or descent in feet per minute (or level).
Squawk code: the transponder code (e.g. 1200 for VFR in many places), when transmitted.

When an aircraft is within range of your antenna, dump1090 listens for those 1090 MHz bursts and decodes them. That decoded stream is what feeds local tools and what people often upload to global tracking networks like FlightAware, Flightradar24 and ADS-B Exchange. Essentially crowdsourced coverage built from many receivers worldwide.

Pi-Sky reads dump1090 data from your receiver, enriches it with third-party APIs (for example route and aircraft details), and serves everything to the browser. Your data stays local unless you separately choose to feed another service.

Features

Simple local web UI served from the Raspberry Pi.
API-backed enrichment (e.g. origin/destination and extra flight context).
Live interactive map of aircraft your receiver is detecting.
Optional Pimoroni Inky e-paper support — generate map images for a connected Inky display (when enabled in config and hardware is present).
SQLite database with configurable retention (e.g. 7 days of position history by default).
Mini maps for individual past flights.
Full-map replay for reviewing a day or week's traffic.

Why Pi-Sky

There are a few Realtime flight data aggregators out there and they are fine. When you feed your data into their system you get access to their entire network and can few flights all over the world not just locally. But they come with issues when you want to have richer data to use for yourself on your own projects. For example I have the Inky E-ink display showing a flights that are flying over head and in order to get that data from flightaware for example I would need to have access to their API. They have a free tier for their API but you need to share payment details and if you request too much they start charging you money.

My goal with Pi-Sky is to get that data from free sources as best I can and have it available for the user to fuss with.

Its not perfect and some flights don't have all the information. Private flights, military and local helicopters tend to not have data on public API's like https://api.adsb.lol so its really just common commercial flights only.

What do you need to run Pi-Sky

Raspberry Pi — The usual setup: Pi, power supply, storage (e.g. microSD), and whatever you use to install software (keyboard/mouse/display or SSH).
ADS-B receiver — Something that receives 1090 MHz and is compatible with dump1090. Often a dedicated ADS-B stick like the FlightAware Pro stick.

1090 MHz antenna — Suited for ADS-B, mounted with a clear sky view.
Network — Wi‑Fi or Ethernet so you can open the Pi-Sky web UI from a browser on your phone or computer but also to connect to the API.
(Optional) Pimoroni Inky — E-paper display if you want the physical map panel; otherwise the UI is browser-only.

To install Pi-Sky on your Raspberry Pi you can head over to the Github page for the code and full install instructions