Skylight — Project Real-Time Aircraft Overhead onto Your Ceiling with an RTL-SDR

Ever looked up at a jet passing overhead and wondered where it's headed? Skylight takes that curiosity and turns your ceiling into a real-time X-ray of the sky above you. Using a $30 RTL-SDR radio, it decodes ADS-B transponder signals from aircraft and renders them as luminous, type-aware glyphs on a projector pointed at your ceiling — with the real Sun, Moon, stars, and even the ISS drawn at their true positions for your location and time.

Created by Cameron Paczek and trending with over 2,300 GitHub stars since its June 2026 release, Skylight transforms a Raspberry Pi, an RTL-SDR, and a projector into a mesmerizing art-installation-meets-flight-tracker.

Why It's Trending

• Unique physical output — most flight trackers live on a phone screen. Skylight projects onto your ceiling, creating an ambient, always-on experience.
• RTL-SDR meets art — it's a perfect blend of radio hacking, real-time rendering, and interior design.
• Fully self-hosted — no cloud dependency for aircraft data when paired with your own ADS-B receiver.
• Optional camera tracker — add a PTZ camera and Skylight automatically films the planes it projects, with AI-powered tracking.
• Appliance-ready — runs as a boot-to-kiosk on Raspberry Pi 5 with zero maintenance.

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) recommended (Pi 4 works for display-only; Pi 3B/Pi Zero 2 W for light setups)
• RTL-SDR Blog V4, V3, or V5 (or any compatible RTL-SDR with ADS-B capability)
• A 1080p projector pointed at the ceiling (a cheap $150 LED projector works great in a dim room)
• Optional: PTZ camera with VISCA-over-IP + RTSP for the auto-filming tracker
• Node.js 20+ / pnpm (for local development testing)
• An SD card with Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm, 64-bit)

Architecture

Skylight follows a modular, streaming architecture with four main layers:

1. ADS-B Reception — An RTL-SDR radio captures 1090 MHz ADS-B signals from aircraft. dump1090-fa decodes these into structured JSON with position, altitude, heading, speed, and callsign.
2. Server Layer — A Node.js (Express + WebSocket) server polls the ADS-B feed at ~1 Hz, enriches aircraft data with airline, type, and route information from adsbdb, and proxies satellite TLEs from Celestrak. All state is broadcast over WebSocket.
3. Display Layer — A Vite + React app renders four views: the main ceiling canvas (2D canvas renderer with celestial engine), a mobile control panel, a TV dashboard, and a tracker debug UI. The display interpolates ~1 Hz fixes to 60 fps for silky-smooth aircraft motion.
4. Optional Camera Tracker — A separate process on port 3001 handles target selection, lead prediction (ECEF), velocity pursuit, and vision-based plane detection (blob detector + YOLOX-Nano ONNX). It drives a VISCA-over-IP PTZ camera and serves an H.264 WebSocket feed.

Quick Start (No Radio Required)

You can try Skylight right now on your laptop using a free public ADS-B API:

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/cpaczek/skylight.git
cd skylight

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Run against the free airplanes.live API
DATA_SOURCE=api pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:5173/ to see simulated aircraft overhead. The control panel at http://localhost:5173/control.html lets you tweak every setting from your phone.

With a Local Radio

# Install the RTL-SDR driver
sudo apt install rtl-sdr    # Debian/Ubuntu
# Or use the provided script:
bash scripts/install-rtlsdr-fedora.sh

# Start the ADS-B decoder
bash scripts/run-dump1090-local.sh

# Launch Skylight
DATA_SOURCE=radio pnpm dev

Raspberry Pi Appliance Setup

For a permanent installation, turn your Pi into a dedicated Skylight appliance:

1. Provision the SD Card

Flash Raspberry Pi OS (Desktop, 64-bit) to an SD card, then run the provisioning script:

sudo BOOT_MNT=/mnt/sdboot \
HOSTNAME_PI=skylight \
WIFI_SSID="YourWiFi" WIFI_PSK="YourPassword" WIFI_COUNTRY=US \
PUBKEY="$(cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub)" \
./pi-setup/provision-sd.sh

2. Install the Appliance

Boot the Pi, SSH in, then:

git clone https://github.com/cpaczek/skylight.git ~/skylight
cd ~/skylight
LAT=37.6213 LON=-122.379 ./pi-setup/install-on-pi.sh

This installs the RTL-SDR driver, dump1090-fa, Node.js, pnpm, builds the app, and installs the systemd service.

3. Set Up the Kiosk Display

./pi-setup/setup-kiosk.sh
sudo reboot

The Pi boots to a full-screen Chromium kiosk showing the display view.

4. Calibrate

From your phone, open http://skylight.local:3000/control and tune rotation and mirror settings against a real overhead pass.

Docker Deployment

For server-driven setups (no Pi at the projector), use Docker Compose:

version: "3.8"
services:
  skylight:
    image: cpaczek/skylight:latest
    build: .
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - DATA_SOURCE=api
      - PORT=3000
    volumes:
      - skylight-data:/app/server/data
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  skylight-data:

docker compose up -d --build
# Open http://<host>:3000/ for the display
# Open http://<host>:3000/control from your phone

To use your own ADS-B receiver, set DATA_SOURCE=radio and point AIRCRAFT_JSON_URL at your dump1090 feed.

Configuration

Skylight's config is defined in shared/src/config.ts and is live-editable from the control panel:

Setting	Description
centerLat / centerLon	Your location — where you're looking up from
radiusMiles	How far out to show aircraft (default: 3 miles)
rotationDeg / mirrorX	Projector calibration for the looking-up flip
theme	Visual theme: ambient, telemetry, or focus
showStars / showSun / showMoon / showSatellites	Sky layer toggles
showDestArc / showRouteDetail	Window-to-elsewhere details
tracker.*	Camera tracker subsystem (all live-tunable)

Verification Checklist

• DATA_SOURCE=api pnpm dev starts and renders aircraft on localhost:5173
• Control panel at /control.html is accessible from your phone on the same LAN
• RTL-SDR is detected: rtl_test -t shows no errors
• dump1090-fa serves aircraft data: curl localhost:8080/aircraft.json returns JSON
• Projector displays smoothly at 60 fps with comet trails
• Phone controls persist settings across server restarts
• Stars, Moon, and Sun render at their correct positions

Resources

• GitHub: github.com/cpaczek/skylight
• Website: skylightceiling.com
• ADS-B decoder: dump1090-fa
• RTL-SDR drivers: rtl-sdr-blog
• Route enrichment: adsbdb
• Satellite elements: Celestrak
• Projector recommendations: Check ProjectorCentral for dim-room LED projectors