Happy September! Here’s what Mr. ADSBee and friends have been up to this past month.
- Events
- Commercial UAV Expo
- Bay Area Maker Faire
- Product Updates
- ADSBee GS3M PoE
- PoE Pants
- ADSBee 1090U Stock Levels
- Software / Firmware Stuff
- whereplane.xyz
- Dual Band Firmware
Events
📅 Catch us at Commercial UAV Expo!
The ADSBee team is at Commercial UAV Expo this week. Find us at booth 1212 (in the exhibitor list as “Pants for Birds LLC”). Hopefully I’ll have some cool photos and products to share in next month’s update (and maybe a few new customers).
📅 Bay Area Maker Faire
ADSBee will be at Bay Area Maker Faire at Mare Island from September 26-28. We had a blast last year and are looking forward to seeing everyone again this year!
Product Updates
🚨 New Product: ADSBee GS3M PoE
What a mouthful! The ADSBee GS3M PoE stands for ADSBee – Ground Station – 3 Band – Metal Enclosure – PoE. This device does exactly what it says on the tin! The ADSBee GS3M PoE is intended to be permanently installed in industrial or outdoor environments that need a PoE ADS-B receiver capable of operating in an IP65 environment between -20°C to +85°C. These environmental ratings are preliminary, pending thorough testing, but they’ve been used to dictate the electrical and mechanical design of the device.
The GS3M PoE comes with a 40x40mm M5 mounting grid on the back of its die cast aluminum enclosure. These mounting holes are created with weather-tight PEM studs recessed into the enclosure, and allow the GS3M PoE to be attached to a custom sheet-metal mounting bracket that can secure the receiver to poles / walls / horizontal struts / etc using either mounting bolts or adjustable pipe clamps.
The ADSBee GS3M PoE is still early on in its design and test cycle, but I’m excited to share more about the device as its design evolves. Under the hood, the GS3M uses ADSBee hardware and firmware, and I’m excited to bring one of the first tri-band Mode S / UAT / Remote ID receivers to market when the ADSBee eventually gets RemoteID in capability.
If you have a commercial application for the ADSBee GS3M PoE, I’d love to chat! Pricing and customization for this design is available by contacting me via Discord or email.
👖 More PoE Pants On the Way!
I’ve been hard at work getting PoE pants into production since they sold out after the initial prototype run, and I’m excited to say that a new batch is in the works! I expect production to be complete by mid-September, at which point parts will be made available in the store.
📦 ADSBee 1090U Stock Levels
The stock of ADSBee 1090Us from the last production run is almost depleted! I expect to sell out of ADSBee 1090U’s pretty quickly in the next week or so, if Commercial UAV Expo goes well, and will be working on restocking as fast as possible. If you need an ADSBee for a project lickety split, now’s the time to grab one before they’re (temporarily) gone! I expect a brief out-of-stock period for a few weeks in the middle of September while the next batch enters production. Backorders will be enabled and orders will ship in the sequence they are received. If all goes well, we should be back up and running with ample stock levels before the end of September.
Software / Firmware Stuff
✈️ Introducing whereplane.xyz
I finally got around to setting up a custom aggregator for ADSBees! Feel free to point a Mode S Beast feed from your ADSBee to feed.whereplane.xyz on port 30004. If you’d like to see traffic data gathered from the handful of ADSBees that are already feeding whereplane, hop on over to globe.whereplane.xyz.
Whereplane.xyz is intended to provide some basic benchmarking of ADSBee receiver performance and coverage, and isn’t intended to compete with serious exchanges like airplanes.live or others with tens of thousands of feeders. Future ADSBee firmware versions will have feed.whereplane.xyz as a feed URI that is enabled by default (it can always be turned off, of course). I’m excited to see new feeds pop up around the world as the project grows! So far we’ve already made it to 3 continents–which one will be next?
👨💻 Dual Band Firmware When?
Dual band firmware with UAT reception is in progress and moving along well, but still needs some stability improvements and features before it can enter the release candidate process. Stay tuned to Discord for 0.9.0-rc1, the first version of the dual band firmware! There’s been quite a few changes requested by people since the original 0.8.2 firmware release, so I expect 0.9.0 to have quite a few major features and changes that will need testing. If you are using ADSBee in a high reliability application, I don’t recommend migrating off of 0.8.2 until we have a stable 0.9.0 release. On the other hand, if you want the latest and greatest and you’re down for some adventure, we’d love to have you along for the ride!
For one example of how deep this firmware update goes, I’ve completely overhauled the CSBee protocol to version 2, which now includes even more exhaustive information for each aircraft, including aircraft dimensions (transmitted while on the ground), both baro and GNSS altitudes and altitude rates for each aircraft (when available), and more. Version 2 of CSBee also adds UAT aircraft along with their custom flags and data fields (which differ in protocol and contents from those of Mode S aircraft). If you’re curious about what this looks like, I’ve attached a snippet of the new CSBee protocol section of the datasheet below!
Under the hood, deep structural changes to the firmware have made the ADSBee’s aircraft dictionary capable of holding and looking up multiple different types of aircraft with varied internal data structures. These upgrades mean that the ADSBee aircraft dictionary can be expanded relatively easily to include aircraft other than Mode S or UAT aircraft in the future, such as RemoteID drones, ADS-L emitters, and more. Stay tuned, this will be an exciting month in firmware land!