Home

Awesome

ADS-B Feeder Image

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/@adsb">intro videos</a>     <a href="https://adsb.im/home"><img src="https://adsb.im/static/images/adsb.im.logo.png" height="30" alt="adsb.im homepage"></a>

Easy to use turn-key SD card image for a number of single board computers (or to run in an x86 VM). Currently we are building the following images:

This setup can work on many other systems - if there is enough demand, we can easily add more boards (as long as they have reasonably well supported versions of ideally DietPi or also Armbian available). Additionally, this software stack (with some differences in the user experience) can be installed on any DietPi board and even on most generic Linux systems running a Debian based distribution.

The idea is to create a "complete" ADS-B feeder that feeds pretty much all of the ADS-B flight trackers / aggregators.

These aggregators have a comittment to open data (daily release of the data); they also share with each other the data fed to them (in order to improve mlat coverage, it still makes sense to feed all of them):

These aggregators are also supported:

Home page of an installed ADS-B Feeder Image

ADS-B Feeder home page

The goal of this project is to make things as simple as possible for the non-technical user.

Feed from a Single Board Computer (like the Raspberry Pi)

Feed from an x86 virtual machine

for VirtualBox or VMware Workstation / Fusion

Download the adsb-im-x86-64-vm-*.ova.xz for the latest release. Double click on the OVA (which should open your virtualization software). Finish the import (under VMware you'll get a warning about a compatibility issue, simply clicking retry should get you past that). Before you start the VM, pass your SDR (which should be connected to a USB port of your PC or Mac) through to that VM. How this is done varries by product and the OS you are running on (Windows, macOS, Linux), but basically in all cases there is an option to pass a USB device to a VM - select your SDR in that list.

Now boot the image and wait a brief while until the console screen stops scrolling and shows a DietPi startup screen that below the two yellow lines presents you with an IP address. Connect to this IP address from your browser and you'll be able to set up the feeder and start sending data to the aggregators of your choice.

As mentioned above, there are known issues with USB timing when accessing an SDR from within a VM - these are unrelated to the ADS-B Feeder image but instead based in the implementation details of most hypervisors. As a result, it is not uncommon to see MLAT issues with feeders running in a VM.

for advanced users wanting to run this image on x86 under Proxmox

You need to be able to ssh into your Proxmox system with the root account.

Feed from most Linux systems

You can also install this software stack as an app on an existing Linux system. If you are running DietPi as the Linux OS on your system, you can simply install it using dietpi-software (it's app 141). Otherwise you can run a small install script. For the trusting kinda people, all you need to do is

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dirkhh/adsb-feeder-image/main/src/tools/app-install.sh | sudo bash

Or you could do the more sensible thing of downloading the script, reading it, and then executing it.

The UI can be accessed via port 1099.

for developers

This repo actually contains the scripting to create the SD card image for some common SBCs to run an ADS-B feeder. And as 'releases' it publishes such images.

This requires CustomPiOS - unpack this next to the CustomPiOS folder in order for the scripts to work.

python app

If you are looking for the sources to the adsb-setup app, they are at src/modules/adsb-feeder/filesystem/root/opt/adsb/adsb-setup