46 Comments
Nov 27, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

What a lucky daughter!

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Aw thank you :)

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Nov 27, 2023·edited Nov 27, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

This is amazing. FYI, I believe it might be a paid feature of the flight radar app, but if you hit "AR", you get a mode where if you point it at the sky it overlays information about the planes you see onto your current camera view, there's an example here: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/introducing-the-all-new-flightradar24-mobile-app/ -- It's great if you live under a major airway.

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That's quite genius, I've always wanted to get into AR

I think some of this data is on the API already, but perhaps not as extenisvely

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Dec 6, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Hey Jacob, firstly, I want to say I love the app. But it’s been “offline” for almost a week. Might want to look at that. Basically it says either the server is overloaded or that it can’t reach the server or it’s offline. One of the reviews mentions it all.

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So sorry for the late response! Looks like OpenSky was having a real bad incident. Seems like it’s back online today!

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Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

This is super cool! I'm a pilot, a coder, and a woman, so it brings me so much joy to see that you built this for your daughter! You should definitely look into what you could do with direct adsb data, which is essentially the next gen technology replacing radar globally. https://www.adsbexchange.com/open-source-software/ has some great resources on how they get and process their data!

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That's a great idea, I've always wanted to get stuck into the hardware side of things

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Came here to suggest this too! This is in fact mainly where the OpenSky API gets their data from! (for the uninitiated: all aircraft are required to transmit their location information through this protocol, and you can listen for it in your local area via software-defined radio!)

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That's awesome! You made my day.

Your daughter is indeed lucky to have such an amazing father.

Congratulations and thank you for your inspiration :)

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author

Thank you for your kind comment :)

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Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

That looks amazing! Installing right now!

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author

Thank you!

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Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

This would be awesome to have on an Apple Watch. Would it take much to get it running on watchOS?

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Embarrasingly I've never built a WatchOS app. But, now that you mention it, I reckon it'd actually be pretty simple given how simple the existing app is

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Jul 26Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Hi I found this while searching for a child friendly radar, My 2 year old loves planes especially military jets, he uses adsb on my phone as there is no version for his kids tablet, he likes to click on each plane and see a picture, unfortunately if he clicks the plane picture again he gets access to adverts etc which is why I was searching for a child friendly advert free version

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author

I hope your kid likes it! I’m told 2 year olds love the colour picker in particular :)

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Jan 15Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Hi Jacob. Is it worth keeping the app installed? Do you think it’ll work again sometime in the future?

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Seems like OpenSky was having an incident - seems like it’s fixed now!

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Jan 20Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Thanks Jacob. I just tried it again. Still broken 😞

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Jan 21Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Aaaand now it’s working just fine. I love it! Great work.

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Dec 21, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

I’m getting the following errors:

“ Data parsing error. Retrying…”

“ Sorry, the server is overloaded.

Please come back later.”

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author

So sorry for the late response! Looks like OpenSky was having a long running incident. Seems like it’s back online today!

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Dec 10, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

Hi Jacob. This app looks great. I installed it but it’s giving me an error. Is that because it won’t work in Australia where I live or has it been a bit too successful for your infrastructure?

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So sorry for the late response! Looks like OpenSky was having a real bad incident which left the API broken. Seems like it’s back online today!

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This is lovely!

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Nov 30, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

This is seriously good. By the way, are you ensuring this substack post gets ranked in Google SEO? That way, readers can directly visit this post and subscribe to you!

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author

Thank you so much for saying :)

Great question - it seems to rank highly for the title; and I have got some tags, but otherwise I've not really thought about the SEO side! I'm gonna do some research on it this week, thanks!

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OMG this is amazing

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I appreciate your comment :)

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Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

This is so inspiring. Well done you, Jacob!

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Thank you! :)

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Nov 28, 2023Liked by Jacob Bartlett

You should explore rtl-sdr and make her portable ADS-B receiver, it's definitely more interesting and may spark interests about radio and electronics.

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That's a great shout, I have always wanted to get stuck into hardware

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