Show HN: ADSBee, an open source dual band embedded ADS-B receiver for anything

6 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by CoolNamesAllTkn

3 Comments

toomuchtodo

13 hours ago

Brilliant, I love it, thanks for sharing. Is there a way to centrally manage a fleet of them for shipping data to an endpoint for online aggregators? Can it report its location via GPS?

Edit: Thank you!

CoolNamesAllTkn

13 hours ago

Currently, customers that run a fleet of ADSBees set them up to feed their own endpoint, which can be very easy to set up using open source software. For instance, we have https://globe.whereplane.xyz/, which is fed by a handful of ADSBees around the world. The code for this aggregator is a single docker compose file, which can be found here: https://github.com/CoolNamesAllTaken/whereplane-xyz

ADSBees can be fully configured over their network connection, including flashing new firmware, so if you put them onto some sort of VLAN network you could update and configure each device pretty easily. They use a network console accessible via USB or WebSocket for configuration and firmware updates.

CoolNamesAllTkn

12 hours ago

Re: the GPS question, there are plans to add GPS support, and we have hardware set up for easy integration of a GPS receiver, since it's a common ask from people who are looking for an electronic flight bag device. It's on the to-do list!

I spent a bunch of time getting the timestamps on the custom receiver to be sub-microsecond accurate (https://pantsforbirds.com/adsbee-1090-july-2025-update/), so the receiver is capable of feeding multilateration (MLAT) networks which decode position based on time of flight of received packets. Combining that feature with live GPS updates would allow creation of an MLAT network with moveable base stations, which would be pretty cool.