led-ticker-flight

A planes-overhead ADS-B flight tracker plugin for led-ticker. It contributes a single flight.overhead widget that shows nearby aircraft — callsign, aircraft type, altitude + climb/descend cue, ground speed, track, and distance/bearing — pulled from the free, keyless adsb.lol API, in the visual language of an airport departures board.

The widget renders in one of three layouts depending on sign shape — a scrolling single-line crawl on a scale-1 sign, or a hi-res single-flight hero / wide multi-column dashboard on a scale-4 sign — chosen automatically or pinned explicitly. See design/README.md for the normative visual spec (palette, airline tail-fin marks, exact layout geometry) this widget faithfully reproduces. Several deliberate divergences from the prototype are documented in code: ticker back-fill for seamless looping, the empty-state label's fit-fallback, and a procedural 7×3 level bar in place of a glyph (each chosen where the prototype's own behavior contradicted its design prose or the hi-res charset it draws from); the prototype's blinking live-refresh pulse dot is dropped entirely (no other led-ticker widget carries an unexplained status indicator, and poll health is already visible in the web UI's Status tab); and hero/dashboard fade the whole card through black for 200ms at each end of a flight's dwell window when 2+ flights are tracked (a hardware-review finding — a hard cut between rotating flights read as a glitch on the physical panel; see Layouts below).

Prerequisites

• A working led-ticker install.
• Internet access on the Pi (the widget polls the adsb.lol API — no API key required).
• The latitude/longitude of your receiver (or antenna/home location) — or set demo = true to preview with a bundled sample feed instead.

Install

The widget auto-registers via the led_ticker.plugins entry point — once the package is installed, no [plugins] config change is needed.

Into a containerized led-ticker (recommended): add this package to config/requirements-plugins.txt (copy it from config/requirements-plugins.example.txt), then rebuild:

led-ticker-flight

# in your led-ticker checkout
docker compose up -d --build

Standalone (a venv that already has led-ticker):

pip install led-ticker-flight

See the led-ticker Plugins docs for the constraint-based install the Docker image uses.

Configuration

[[playlist.section]]
[[playlist.section.widget]]
type = "flight.overhead"
latitude = 40.7128
longitude = -74.0060
radius_km = 30

A complete, runnable example (with every field commented) lives at examples/flight.toml.

Field reference

No font/color knobs — the design handoff pins them (see design/README.md); the semantic palette (ident white, altitude amber, speed green, track cyan, distance magenta, climb/descend cues) and airline tail-fin colors are fixed across every layout and sign.

Layouts

• ticker — a single-line, continuously-scrolling BDF crawl through every tracked aircraft's full field set, dot-separated. Targets scale-1 signs (smallsign) where hi-res drawing isn't available.
• hero — one flight at a time, shown large: a swept tail-fin, a hi-res callsign, an airline-name/type line, a metrics line (vertical-rate cue, altitude, speed, track, distance), and paging dots. Rotates through the tracked flights on a fixed dwell. Targets narrower hi-res signs (scale > 1, < 400 physical px — e.g. bigsign).
• dashboard — the widescreen layout: hero ident on the left, four labelled metric columns (altitude, speed, track, distance) filling the rest of the width. Targets wide hi-res signs (scale > 1, >= 400 physical px — e.g. longboi).

layout = "auto" (the default) resolves at draw time from the canvas's scale and physical width, so the same config works unmodified across smallsign/bigsign/longboi deploys.

With 2 or more tracked flights, hero/dashboard fade the entire card through black for 200ms at the start and end of each flight's dwell window (0.4s total spent near/at black per rotation) instead of cutting straight to the next flight. A single tracked flight is just held — it never fades.

Data source

Aircraft come from adsb.lol's /v2/point/{lat}/{lon}/{radius} endpoint — free, public, no API key. Be a good citizen of the shared endpoint: the default 10s interval is already frequent for a keyless public API; don't lower it without reason. Aircraft missing a callsign, altitude, or position are dropped; the remaining set is sorted by distance and capped at max_aircraft.

Development

This package lives in the led-ticker-plugins monorepo. Run tooling from the repo root:

uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest plugins/flight
uv run ruff check plugins/flight
uv run pyright plugins/flight/src