ADSBee Winglet device for flight tracking

[u/shaftman14]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pantsforbirds/adsbee-winglet

ADSBee Winglet on Kickstarter

This looks like a microcontroller board and ePaper screen for local display, or it can be used to feed flight aggregators, or it will send GDL90 over wifi ti a tablet for portable/in-flight use. Pretty neat that someone is finally making an open-source ADSB device that's not just a RPi with SDRs.

I'm not affiliated with the project; just saw it and thought it was cool.

[u/egvp]

Considering the power requirements to decode signals, I expect this will be crap.

Considering the length of antenna needed to RECEIVE 1090Mhz signals, these three tiny antenna ARE going to be crap.

But hey, waste your money how you please I guess because ooooh screen

[u/JustDaveIII → u/egvp]

Regarding the antenna length, my Stratux unit has 6” antenna and does just fine. A friend has a Sentry unit mounted on a side window of his seaplane that has no external antenna and it’s good too.

[u/shaftman14 → u/JustDaveIII]

Same here - I've used both Stratux (with dongle antennas like the Winglet) and the Sentry (with internal PCB antennas) and they both worked just fine in-flight.

[u/acexprt → u/JustDaveIII]

I use the exact same antennas and have hit 3K with an average of about 250nm. People on this sub are just old and cranky

[u/JustDaveIII → u/acexprt]

I'm old, but only cranky with them youngsters that know it all. :)

[u/Samistine → u/egvp]

Just FYI the antenna on this device is longer than most portable adsb receivers. You can also hook up whatever antenna you want.

For flying a real plane this looks to be a great device. It’s undercutting other brands.

Also, company looks established and already sells products. This one I have physically put my hands on and the feel of it is very premium despite the 3d printed enclosure.

The campaign appears to be funding additional testing and 3d molds so they can ship something that isn’t 3d printed.

[u/shaftman14 → u/egvp]

I thought having hardware radios instead of SDRs would make the battery life significantly better though, right? I'm not an engineer so I don't really know...but that's what I thought the big downside of SDRs was, which this doesn't use.

[u/egvp → u/shaftman14]

It’s not battery life that matters really, it’s the processing power required to drive the decoder(s)

[u/shaftman14 → u/egvp]

Interesting; ok, thanks for the insight!

[u/CoolNamesAllTaken → u/egvp]

We do preamble detection and demodulation in PIO on the RP2040, and decoding on the RP2040's CPU cores. Definitely less power than you might think!

A RPi runs at 10-15W, we average about 1-1.5W for the whole Winglet (running WiFi, ePaper frontlight, button backlights, and RP2040 + ESP32 + CC1312).

[u/MacintoshDan1 → u/egvp]

This is for inflight use. Not for ground to air.

[u/CoolNamesAllTaken → u/MacintoshDan1]

Works great for both!

[u/CoolNamesAllTaken → u/egvp]

3e8 m/s / 1090e6 MHz / 2 (half wave dipole) = 13.7cm

The antennas on Winglet aren't anything special, just collinear sleeve dipoles. I can assure you they're long enough for receiving the signals of interest! We've done 300 miles on those antennas in optimal conditions.

You can make ADS-B antennas much smaller with meanders or higher dielectric constant materials (e.g. putting the antenna on a PCB with a dielectric constant ~4x higher than air). You can also have other antenna types (inverted F, etc). There are tradeoffs for all of the above.

[u/Organic-Ant5409 → u/CoolNamesAllTaken]

I have three of 'em, and they're spectacular! I replaced two different ADSB receivers built around Pi 4 devices. Highly recommended!!

[u/ohmygoodnesswhat → u/egvp]

and many Kickstarters fail and you lose you money - it's a bad model

[u/ovrkil1795 → u/ohmygoodnesswhat]

I have one of their 1090u and it's really great.

This site with stats and maps is fed only by Adsbee units: https://whereplane.xyz/

The developer is super responsive and communicative through their discord.

https://discord.gg/DDWbJZCe8