I built this over the weekend using an old Nokia phone and a Raspberry PI 3B+, you can view the images here: https://pilane.obviy.us/
Some technical details:
– The Nokia 5.4 Android device is powered by the Pi via USB
– Pi connects to the phone via adb
– The Pi uses `scrcpy` to mirror the phone’s back camera to /dev/video0 using v4l2loopback
– The video feed is then fed to a Python script that uses YOLOv11 to detect airplanes
– If the image contains an airplane, the flight data is fetched from Flightradar24
– The data is sent to a Telegram channel and updated on the website
It’s working really well! I’m able to see pictures of Air Force planes flying overhead for Republic Day too (one of these is not like the others 
):
Please feel free to suggest any improvements. Right now I’m not too happy with the image quality, would love to hear your ideas!
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