u/Clank75

There was a thread recently about 'useless things you run in your homelab', and someone suggested ADS-B; naturally looking for weekend projects, I was inspired :-).

I had an old RasPi floating around, so that part came out of storage - but I figured it was a nice excuse to try out one of Racknex's Raspberry Pi rackmount kits that I've been looking for a reason to play with for ages... I also popped one of their "SBC-LCD01" SPI TFT displays on there (because blinkenlights are the most important thing in a rack.)

I'm running the Flightradar24 Raspi image, and also updated it so I'm feeding adsbexchange as well.

A few observations...

• I quite like the Racknex SBC-204 that I chose for rackmounting (just need to find three more Raspberry Pis to put in there to fill in the blanks), my only complaint would be it would be nice if the sliding rail option allowed you to pull the unit a bit further out before you have to remove from the rails entirely. But this is a minor niggle, overall it's decent and well made.
• Annoyingly, what I didn't realise until after I'd racked everything is that the 'window' on the front of the rack unit is actually slightly smaller than the LCD display, so I need to adjust my display (currently it's cropping off the callsign.)
• I hesitate to mention it, but the app to update the LCD is a very simple vibecoded (using a local model) Rust app that just reads the /run/readsb/aircraft.json file and drives the LCD via SPI.
• Getting the actual ADS-B software up and running was super easy!

So, thank you to the sub for the idea!

(ETA:

• Argh, how did I not notice the typo in the Title until after I posted, dammit,
• Another observation - on the Racknex LCD display. Pro-tip: DO NOT use the vertical header pins that they actually provide with the LCD module if you plan to mount it in their rack bracket. Instead, solder some 90-degree right-angle header pins to the module; it's much too tight inside the mounting bracket.)