This Raspberry Pi matrix display tracks flights in real time

We’ve seen all sorts of cool Raspberry Pi projects through the years that use matrix panels — from simple ideas like this snazzy Pi-powered matrix dashboard to more interactive things like this retro gaming matrix setup. Today, however, we’ve got something entirely new to share that really shakes up what we’ve come to expect from these sorts of builds. Maker and developer Wesley G Mitchell has put together a Raspberry Pi-powered flight tracker that outputs to a custom matrix display.

LED Matrix Flight Tracker from r/raspberry_pi

This isn’t the first Pi-powered flight tracker we’ve seen, in fact, we published a guide ourselves on how to make a flight tracker with a Raspberry Pi and an ADS-B receiver. Although, instead of using a matrix panel, Ryder took things a step further and projected the flight data onto his ceiling.

This project is far from plug and play. There were quite a few things that Mitchell had to tackle to get to the final design we see in the project thread. The matrix display is comprised of four separate panels, all of which are controlled by the Pi. On the screen, you can see nearby flights as they are detected along with their flight path data.

The final panel is big and looks nice with a dense resolution (for a matrix display anyway) that lets you clearly read the flight data. Each panel has 64 x 64 pixels, adding up to a total of 128 x 128px. Mitchell is using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this project but you could get away with using and older Raspberry Pi, or the latest Raspberry Pi 5 in its place. A USB RTL-SDR dongle is used to retrieve flight information.

Mitchell was kind enough to make the project open source and has shared information about how he’s programmed the flight tracking matrix display, including a link to dump1090 which is helping read data from the RTL-SDR receiver. You can also find Mitchell’s source code for the matrix flight tracker over at GitHub.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check it out in detail over at Reddit. Be sure to follow Mitchell for more cool projects as well as any future updates to this one.