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The repo subtitle is `Project the aircraft passing overhead onto your ceiling, in real time — an X-ray through the roof.`
The demo video starts outside pointing at a cloudy sky with an airplane passing overhead. My mind, seeded with the word "x-ray", thought the outside shot was the video projection on his ceiling. I thought his rain gutters were crown molding, and when the camera man runs inside, I thought he was running outside to show the real life airplane.
The actual projection is neat, but how fun would it be to have an x-ray projection of the night sky.
Homestar Pro still sells. Kenko bought the line around 2010. For planes you'd want real-time ephemeris data driving the projector — different problem than static star catalogs.
Same. I was convinced the ceiling shot was just a good fisheye lens on a cloudy night. Took me three replays to realize I was completely wrong about which direction the camera was pointing.
Wow so cool! I had daydreamed about doing something similar with e-ink display on my wall so I could see details about whatever plane I'm hearing.. but this blows that out of the water.
The e-ink wall idea is actually underexplored — as far as I know nobody's shipped a good ambient flight display that doesn't require a dedicated screen. The ceiling projection just has more presence.
I bought several 3b+ Raspberries a really long time ago and this seems like the perfect simple&breathtaking project for such ancient hardware. Who needs a fourth PiHole on their local network?!
"Fortunately" I live directly beneath CHA's main landingstrip, so lots of regular data available. Fortunately, I am not in the main takeoff path because that would be much worse.
I've got a Raspberry Pi 2b I've been using for probably close to a decade, with two SDRs hanging off it, pulling aircraft ADS-B locations and VHF radio transmissions out of the sky. It's a great application for this platform. ADS-B scanner averages about 25% CPU and the VHF airband receiver averages about 17% (uses hardware FFT).
Unlike models with lots of memory, the Pi3 1GB and Pi4 1GB are still cheap, but the Pi4 1GB is sold out everywhere. I think the Pi4 is sweet spot for small projects.
Random aside: there’s a restaurant in San Diego on the SAN flight path with a split flap display over the bar. Every time a flight passes over it updates to show flight number and departure airport. It’s quite neat.
Would have loved a post on working out the geometry of the projection, especially if it accounted for transitions of ceiling to wall. That would be fun.
The surface through which one is projecting is a flat rectangle. Had it been a hemispherical dome one wouldn't have had to do anything special for the transitions.
Technically this is projection mapping onto a ceiling, not ceiling projection mapping, which would imply the ceiling itself is projecting. Small thing but it bugged me.
The demo video starts outside pointing at a cloudy sky with an airplane passing overhead. My mind, seeded with the word "x-ray", thought the outside shot was the video projection on his ceiling. I thought his rain gutters were crown molding, and when the camera man runs inside, I thought he was running outside to show the real life airplane.
The actual projection is neat, but how fun would it be to have an x-ray projection of the night sky.