Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A high-altitude low-power flight computer for high-altitude balloons
I've been working on this for a while now, and I'm happy to share! I've been into launching weather balloons for a few years. One aspect of the hobby that really drew me in was the tracking side of things. Tracking systems let you follow the balloon's position throughout the flight and, most importantly, know exactly where it lands so you can recover the instrumentation. APRS is what I started out using during my first few years in the hobby, after I got my amateur radio license in 2020 (W0MXX). I designed a few small boards using the trackuino…
This is a flight computer designed for high-altitude weather balloons that enables tracking and recovery of instrumentation. Built by an amateur radio enthusiast, it uses APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System)… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites.
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Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
2025 · jameshard.ing · its alternatives →
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DIY plane spotting with a Raspberry Pi and an Android phone
2025 · pilane.obviy.us · its alternatives →
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Hello, I'd like to share a 3D plane tracking web app that I developed called: skies-adsb. Living near KMIA (a very busy airport), I spend a lot of time plane spotting and thought it would be cool to track planes in 3D. In October 2021, I built a prototype 3D ADS-B flight tracker called skies-adsb using p5.js. In April 2022, I released version 1.0 of skies-adsb, rewritten in Three.js. However, this release still relied on manual editing of GeoJSON layers. By late 2024, I had learned enough about GIS and GeoPandas to automate map creation using custom GeoJSON layers. During the Christmas…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6AAAstro App▲291
I really like Stellarium and SkySafari but I felt like these are primarily geared towards exploring the sky but not so much "here are the long list of things I want to see, when can I see them tonight and where". There's also not really a great option I've found that combines sky object planning + location weather details while still being free so I built this. The UI's heavily inspired by NINAs sky atlas + Robinhood. Right now you can: View the altitude chart of objects and 3D view Create lists of objects of interest View the annual max/min daily altitude of an object to find the best…
2024 · astro.sshh.io · its alternatives →
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Flighty 4.0▲296Live flight tracker w/ the world's fastest delay alerts
2024 · flighty.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…
Nov 2025 · radi8.dev · its alternatives →
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Descent▲160Set a budget and get alerted when flights get cheap
Mar 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Wingbits AI▲266AI agents for real-time aircraft monitoring and alerts
May 2026 · wingbits.ai · its alternatives →
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Skyty▲69Your flight's altitude, ground speed, nearest airport + ETA
Apr 2026 · skyty.app · its alternatives →
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We built the smallest dual-band aircraft trackerfrom $48/mo▲95I grew frustrated with closed source ADS-B receivers a few years ago, and wanted to build a true low cost embedded ADS-B receiver from scratch for low power applications. I ended up developing a custom radio frontend that uses RP2040 PIO for Mode S preamble detection and demodulation, and also released the first open soruce implementation of UAT decoding on an RF MCU from TI (which works somewhat beyond the publicly stated specs for the chip). Today, ADSBee is a fully featured dual-band ADS-B receiver, with Mode S, ADSB, UAT ADSB, UAT TIS-B / FIS-B, a ton of configurable reporting…
Aug 2026 · pantsforbirds.com · its alternatives →
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Flight Follower▲114Ad free flight tracking for aviation enthusiasts
Jan 2026 · flightfollower.app · its alternatives →
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Guiding you in Navigating Turbulence. Utilizing SkyPath’s OneLayer - smart, consolidated ride quality layer, PIREP reports, and AI-powered turbulence Nowcast.
2024 · skypath.io · its alternatives →
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Me and a few friends made this design document as part of our entry to the UK CanSat competition where a high school team is required to build a probe to be launched. The probe must serve some purpose, and ours was to map the temperature and pressure of the air at different altitudes. We had the opportunity to launch it a week ago and you can find the video of our launch here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bsLzxjP7OWRqVvCB62cLv7QYLR... During the launch we reached 400m above sea level, and the can pulled 70gs successfully. The parachute and can stayed intact.…
2025 · drive.google.com · its alternatives →
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AstroAlert▲113Know exactly when satellites pass above you.
Nov 2025 · astroalert.app · its alternatives →
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2020 · fl7b8.csb.app · its alternatives →
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A thrust-vectoring model rocket flight computer. Comes with all you need to keep your rocket pointing up. - AdamMarciniak/CygnusX1
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →