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ma2016 t1_j3mx7qe wrote

Reply to comment by HeyZeusDiedForYou in Raspberry Pi launches higher resolution camera module, now with autofocus | Alongside the company’s Camera Module 3, it’s also releasing a new module for use with M12-mount lenses. by chrisdh79

An easy project is to set up a flight tracker in your own home! https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/

I did it with my old Raspberry Pi because I was desperate to do something with it. The extra parts (antenna and USB signal converter) are like less than 40 bucks if I remember right. Took me like an afternoon to get it all setup. You contribute data to FlightAware and in exchange you get free Enterprise membership (like 100s of dollars/year). You can also set it up so you contribute to FlightRadar24 as well, with a similar membership incentive. I go on a lot of business trips so it's fun to have access to all the extra flight data and keep track of where my plane is. Also, with FlightAware there's a specific web page where they show you exactly what your antenna is detecting. It's really cool to see that I'm tracking some international flight at 35,000 ft and hundreds of miles away all from my apartment haha

TL;DR: It's a fun easy project requiring few extra parts. However, once it's set up there's not much to do with it except check on it.

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HeyZeusDiedForYou t1_j3n3zhe wrote

That’s awesome, would love to hear any other recommendations if you have any

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ma2016 t1_j3n7tz9 wrote

Only other thing I considered doing was setting up a twitter bot that tweeted out the largest donors to politicians that voted to overturn the 2020 election. fec.gov tracks all political donations, including basic info on individual donors. They have an API through which you can query data like any other API. I messed around for a while and got pretty much what I wanted out of some basic Python scripts.

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What I wanted to do (before several life events got in the way in 2022) was set up a service on my second Raspberry Pi which periodically queried the FEC API for the largest recent donors to this list of politicians. Then I would have a twitter account specifically set up to tweet the results. I was gonna call it "Insurrectionist Tracker" or something like that. Anyway, ended up only being able to get the python scripts to run locally on my windows PC, never set up the second Pi. I also was definitely not going to learn how to use the Twitter API in any reasonable amount of time. And now things are extra screwed cause of how Musk is handling things. Maybe I'll make a website or something.

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