Thursday 

Room 2 - Level 3 

17:40 - 18:40 

(UTC±00

Talk (60 min)

Tracking Aircraft with Streams + Software-Defined Radio

Aircraft are everywhere. Knowing exactly where is paramount as it’s considered bad form for two aircraft to be in the same place at the same time.

IoT
Microservices
Fun

To avoid this, aircraft worldwide constantly and publicly broadcast their location, heading, and all sorts of other data using a system called ADS-B or Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast.

This data is a natural fit for an event stream. After all, it’s a constant stream of data that is literally being broadcast in real-time. But how can we capture these broadcasts and the data within? Surely it must require expensive hardware and special tools!

Not so much. It turns out that we can capture ADS-B data easily using a combination of a cheap radio dongle and free software—a combination called software-defined radio. From there we can store it in an event stream and consume, transform, and publish it at our leisure. Cool, right?

In this session, you’ll learn how software-defined radio works (and not just for ADB-S), how to receive and store ADS-B data in event streams, and how to use those streams to build a map showing real-time flight data using Node.js, Redis Streams, and whatever front-end JavaScript framework happens to be popular that day!

Guy Royse

Guy works for Redis as a Developer Advocate. Combining his decades of experience in writing software with a passion for learning—and for sharing what he has learned—Guy explores interesting topics and spreads the knowledge he has gained around developer communities worldwide.

Teaching and community have long been a focus for Guy. He runs his local JavaScript meetup in Ohio and has served on the selection committees of numerous conferences. He'll happily speak anywhere that will have him and has even has helped teach programming at a prison in central Ohio.

In his personal life, Guy is a hard-boiled geek interested in role-playing games, science fiction, and technology. He also has a slightly less geeky interest in history and linguistics. In his spare time he likes to camp and studies history and linguistics.

Guy lives in Ohio with his wife, his sons, and an entire wall of board and role-playing games.