I wanted one of those LED “nearest plane” desk displays, then realised Home Assistant could do the same job on a dashboard for nothing. So here it is.
What it shows
- The nearest aircraft to your home, updated every 15 seconds
- Airline name lit in its own brand colour — easyJet orange, Ryanair yellow, BA blue
- Where it departed and where it’s going, with a calculated arrival time
- Callsign, type, registration, altitude, ground speed, distance
- Filter chips: LOCAL, COMMERCIAL, LIGHT, HELI, MIL
- Tap the card for a live map, with the marker drawn as an airliner, light aircraft, helicopter or jet and rotated to its heading
- Map and marker follow sunrise and sunset, light by day and dark at night
- Information panel with a photograph of the actual aircraft, matched by registration
Helicopters and military traffic are sparse, so those two chips search much wider than the 25 nm local scan — tap HELI and you’ll get the nearest one even if it’s 200 miles away, with the distance shown.
No account, no API key, no subscription. Free community ADS-B data and your own Home Assistant home location.
Being straight about the limits
- Light aircraft, military and many cargo flights have no published route, so those show “Route not published”. That’s the data, not the card.
- The arrival time is calculated from current position and ground speed in a straight line. It’s usually a few minutes early of the real touchdown and is not the airline’s timetable.
- Aircraft classification is a heuristic and will occasionally get an unusual aircraft wrong.
- Setup currently needs a YAML package and a restart. An integration with a config flow is in progress to replace that step.
Feedback and pull requests welcome — particularly airline colours I’ve missed for your part of the world, which are one line each in the card file.