skylight

Skylight projects the aircraft flying over your house onto your ceiling in real time, with the actual sky behind them: sun, moon, bright stars, and the ISS. It reads ADS-B signals from a cheap software-defined radio, enriches each plane with its airline and route, and renders the whole thing as a live ceiling display. MIT licensed and free.

This is a hardware project, so the cost is parts and patience, not software. You need an RTL-SDR radio with an antenna, a Raspberry Pi 5, and a projector pointed up. You can try it with no radio at all using a free public flight API, which is the smart way to see if you like it before buying anything. The docs and deploy scripts are solid, but configuring the Pi and aligning the projector is real setup work.

There is no team-size calculus here. This is a personal project, an art installation, and a genuinely fun way to learn how ADS-B and software-defined radio actually work. If you have ever wondered what is flying overhead, build it. If you want a practical tool for shipping software, this is not one, and that is exactly the point.

The catch is the hardware tax and the radio reality. Local ADS-B reception depends on your antenna and line of sight, so a bad spot means spotty planes. A commercial ready-made kit is in the works, which is fine, but the free path is the source code and your own parts bin.