Show HN: I built a DIY plane spotting system at home(pilane.obviy.us) |
Show HN: I built a DIY plane spotting system at home(pilane.obviy.us) |
My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar (November 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar (January 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094288
Not decoding HDMI HDCP or anything, but a webcam + AI or whatever that watches football with me and mutes ads. Similar to plane detection, maybe. Are there any projects like this?
* auto commercial block using audio fingerprinting and duration, so if it finds the ad, it knows the ad will last 10-15-30-60 seconds.
* frame-slowdown. often ads just show way too many frame jumps in rapid succession. If this is detected, visual mute would freeze one of the frames and only allow a jump after 5-10s.
* visual mute - if the commercial is not identified audibly, have a blur or black box that covers 85% of the center of the screen. you would un-mute it when you recognize your game from the borders.
* logo-blur. OpenCV to recognize most common ad logos and blur or black them
* commercial-over-dub. allow funny joke audio to be played over existing, known commercials. So when they show insurance ads, someone can say "yeah they didn't pay my $40k roof claim because I didn't have hail coverage", right over the insurance logo
* announcer over-dub. This would allow aspiring sports announcers (or comedians) to have their audio played in place of the game audio. This would require some visual sync, which would include a few seconds of delay. I bet there are some really good announcers out there who would love a chance to announce a game. Also some really funny smart-asses , or you could choose a biased announcer who roots with you for YOUR team and disparages the other!
Related:
In Black Mirror, they pause the advertisement when you disable the sound.
So maybe you'll eventually have to use a separate sound system whereby they cannot detect that you're muting it.
Then, they'll track your eyes and require you to watch the screen :)
At which point do you stop consuming?
Check out the recent controversy over Activision and Call of Duty. Evidently the game code requires access to your webcam and the company has patents on using your gameplay to train a bot that play like you do, then uses the idle time to make the bot play while you are away. This bulks up the pool of players ensuring you are matched with people resulting in a good experience for you. There's also a patent detecting your emotional state while you view their in game store, possibly for adjusting price to influence you to buy or spend more.
I do not watch TV but it was in the news.
MBAs think they can enshittfy into perpetuity, but eventually people have enough and leave to whatever the competition is.
The tech cultists won't, will always think "urrhurr let's counter this corporate restriction / government regulation with <stupid tech solution #921>.
It's so rewarding to do simpler things in life instead, f.e. growing your own food and not partake in this "more-and-more pervasive tech spread" BS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
Or the title bar below. You could do some basic OCR on a Pi, when the team names are readable, keep the volume up, when they are not, disable it.
I think you could do this. If you had a web page logged into the same program it could analyze the video. I wonder if people build "video scraping" from web page tv apps, probably some drm blocking thing.
There also used to be subsonic chimes or something simila on the network tv audio to signal to some other server (maybe at the local tv station?) that would know to automatically run a commericial right now.
I'll post a write up in a few days.
You know roughly the perspective that the camera sees the plane from, so you take the plane position at that timestamp and project that perspective line down onto the ground. The higher the plane, the more error there is with estimating the observation axis, so the less accurate this gets.
Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.
this person has some sort of OpenCV setup from a high-rise view. (bonus: Air Force One is currently there)
The extreme zoom of the camera makes everything look close together. In reality it's probably quite far from most other planes.
>Especially with what appears to be no ground troops surrounding the plane.
Why would you have them stand outside to guard the plane when the airport is already fenced off, and has surveillance/security? Even if they do need people guarding it, it doesn't make sense to stand outside. Waiting inside or in a nearby SUV would be much more comfortable for the guards.
The black parking lot would change in shade/hue so have to account for a range.
The complexity maybe comes in in identifying our cars parked there vs someone else’s, so maybe I need number plate recognition. However my camera would be top down so likely no number plate would be visible.
Any thoughts/recommendations are helpful
This plane suspiciously looks like a bird though: https://i.imgur.com/cUdnZTN.png
It's a really cool time to be checking right now! All commercial flights are grounded in Delhi for Republic Day celebrations so I'm able to see images of Air Force planes!
People aren't getting airplanes confused with drones because they look the same. People are getting worked up about drones because of collective paranoia, and then they are seeing what they want to see.
First, I believe that this term has been introduced by the us government, so it’s not the crackpots laundering the conspiracy themselves by using a new term.
Second, I believe the reason UAP was introduced is to describe properly recorded and credibly witnessed and described phenomena (tic-tac, etc) that are not explained by any publically known craft, engineering, or science, but aren’t likely aliens either; and that is well described by UAP which doesn’t directly imply aliens that ufo does.
Jan 26, 2025 ~2:45 PM
IGO • A20N ROUTE AJL → DEL ALTITUDE 1,325 FT GROUND SPEED 137 KTS VERT. SPEED -768 FT/MIN
https://pilane.obviy.us/_astro/38e014bd.CJs63r7b_Z2lCImg.web...
I hadn't thought to look for smart meters, but my RTL-SDR (and my Flipper Zero) can pick up all sorts of temperature sensors, etc.
A quick google found this rtlamr project with a number of blog posts about people doing this with it.
Source?
>then uses the idle time to make the bot play while you are away
Surely they're better off using a GPU cluster to do training like every other AI company?
What a tragic state of affairs! Computationally detecting human emotion is an open problem in human-computer interaction, and has been for a while now. I wish I had the hubris and audacity to file a process patent which claims to be able to do so.
What?! I've seen the viral guy on social media who can pinpoint places in the world by looking at a photo but... a few hundred meters based on the angle of the sun/moon? That's wild!
This method is not just from measuring the angle of moon/sun, but using the plane (which has a known position) as a marker. Just by using the angle of sun and moon, you need to be extremely precise. 1 degree error is 1/360 of the circumference of earth distance, that’s about 100km.
You'd still need reference data from the photo to triangulate where it was taken from. A blurry 600x600 photo is going to have plenty of uncertainty.
>Not incredibly challenging at that point to narrow in on roughly where the photos were taken from.
Most people probably don't care as long as it doesn't pinpoint a specific address.
Also, they're showing (and linking to) FlightRadar24's departure and destination data, it's quite clear they are on one of the approaches to Delhi International (DEL). I don't know how many runways DEL has, but there's no more than 4 possible lines planes take in approach and departure. If i cared enough I could easily work out which of those lines by checking FlightRadar for the history of one of the links, and match the timestamp with the FR tracklog.
Collection 100s of images any attempting to do geometry magic is unnecessarily complicating things. (Which is fine if your goal is to solve complicated problems for fun. But there is a much easier way.)
Yes shooting down a drone is an offense in the US, unless you're in law enforcement or the military in specific situations.
https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/analysis...
