Having spent some time building the Wifi Ghost I wanted it to be something that was actually used. Few people in the house found the interest to change color on a daily basis (myself included). Then it occured to me, why not let the pilots of the aircrafts buzzing around the airspace of southern Sweden control it? They will probably never know that by passing within a few kilometers of my ADS-B receiver they will light up my study.

This will be a small project as most parts are already in place. The ADS-B tracker from my Skygrazer project will feed a script that sets the ghost color via its MQTT topic. What color though? Well, the most prominent color in the airlines’s logo of course! Make a Bing image search for the name of the airline with the word “logo” appended, pick an image, download and analyze. The color will be dimmed according to the distance to the aircraft. I use a maximum distance of 2 kilometers making the light fade up and down whenever an aircraft passes near my house.

The result? A wifi ghost light put to good use. And art 🙂

Code available on Github.