Happy post-Thanksgiving! Here’s what we’ve been up to this month.

TL; DR

• ADSBee 1090 preorders are 100% shipped!
• Documentation
• Huge firmware update (0.6.2)

ADSBee 1090 Preorders 100% Shipped 📦🚀

All ADSBee 1090 preorders have been shipped, and should be arriving shortly! Many beta testers have already had a chance to try out their devices, and a number of them are currently feeding aggregator sites like airplanes.live and adsb.fi.

As of the time of writing, new orders for the ADSBee 1090 Beta Kit ship in 1-2 business days.

Documentation 📄

Documentation for the ADSBee 1090 has been updated and improved! There’s now a quick-start guide with details about how to set up and configure an ADSBee, and the datasheet has been updated with a comprehensive description of all of the available AT commands.

ADSBee 1090 Firmware 0.6.2 💻

Besides shipping devices, most of my time this month was dedicated to a significant firmware update, which is now released as firmware version 0.6.2. This update includes a wide range of new firmware features and bug fixes. The full list of new features is available in the release notes, but I’ll go over two big ones here!

ADSBee 1090 Web UI

The most visible new feature is the web UI hosted by the ADSBee 1090’s ESP32 module. At the top of the page, a simulated terminal window allows direct input of AT commands to the ADSBee 1090’s command line interface, providing an easy way to interact with the ADSBee 1090’s configuration capabilities over a network connection. The bottom section of the UI includes a dashboard which presents metrics about how packets are being decoded, as well as information about currently active feeds.

The Web UI can be accessed by visiting the ADSBee’s IP address (192.168.4.1) on its self-hosted WiFi network, or by visiting its assigned IP address on an external WiFi network (you’ll need to instruct the ADSBee to join the network first using the serial command line interface).

Not-So-Secret Feature: because the console on the web UI is implemented as a WebSocket, you can connect to it from any device on the network by opening a WebSocket targeted to ws://<ADSBee IP address>/console. Happy hacking!

Mode S Beast Feeding

The ADSBee 1090’s Mode S Beast feed capability is just beginning to stretch its legs! ADSBee can now feed arbitrary IP addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.103) and DNS addresses (e.g. feed.adsb.fi) with demodulated Mode S packets in Mode S Beast format. Feed URIs and ports can be configured via the `AT+FEED` command.

What’s Next? 🔮

Upcoming Firmware Features

Here are a few major firmware features that I’m actively working on, or will be working on shortly! If you’d like to request features and bugfixes, please open or comment on an issue in the GitHub repository! Engagement is always appreciated, and issues let me prioritize what features are needed the most urgently.

If you are interested in contributing to any of these features (or others), please get in touch via Discord! Pull requests are always welcomed–let’s harness the power of open source together. 🌈📈

Network Bootloader

I’m currently developing a network bootloader which will allow users to update the firmware on their ADSBee remotely. This will be especially useful for anyone who wants to put their ADSBee somewhere less easily accessible, e.g. an attic space or a tree! Implementing this network bootloader is a bit of a complicated task that has been at least a month in the making, with some cursed adventures in linker files and CMake dependencies along the way. Fortunately, things are shaping up nicely, and it should be ready for (experimental) release soon!

Ethernet Support

The hardware on ADSBee 1090 has been designed from the beginning with Ethernet support in mind. The software driver for a W5500 Ethernet IC has been already been baked into the firmware on the ESP32, so in theory it shouldn’t be too hard to whack a proper Ethernet driver into the firmware and get something working with some janky hookup wire and a W5500 Lite module. Combined with a USB C PoE splitter, this could let users install their ADSBee 1090 in any PoE accessible location! Stay tuned for some fun prototyping on Discord. As long as I haven’t absolutely goofed some pinouts on the ESP32, we should be able to put together something that works!

Checksum Correction

One of the primary inhibitors of ADSBee 1090 performance has been demodulated packets with invalid checksums. These packets may be a symptom of some algorithmic errors under the hood in PIO demodulation, or could be related to the analog response time of various parts of the electronic frontend of the ADSBee’s custom receiver. Either way, there seems to be a pretty substantial pile of packets laying around with very serviceable signal strength and signal quality metrics, which nonetheless don’t resolve to a valid checksum. I’m excited to dedicate some time to implementing CRC correction techniques to see if any of these packets can be recovered! I’m hopeful that analyzing bit flip locations within demodulated messages might also offer some clues about what’s causing the invalid decodes in the first place, to see if additional receiver improvements can be made.

Manufacturing Improvements

The ADSBee Beta’s purpose is to collect feedback and performance / reliability data ahead of mass production of ADSBee 1090 in Q1 of 2025. I’m spending a good deal of time putting together data systems and test fixtures to provide traceability for devices through the manufacturing process. These might be fun topics for a writeup or a video in the future!

In the meantime, a good deal of effort is being dedicated to improving yield with the current manufacturing run. Some components on the ADSBee 1090 have proven to be remarkably temperature sensitive, requiring tweaks to some parts of the assembly process and additional testing before each device is shipped. Manufacturing and reliability testing will be an increasingly large focus moving forward. If you have a Beta unit that exhibits any weird / unexpected hardware behaviors, please get in touch! I’m very eager to learn about any and all failure device failure modes, and will happily replace any hardware that has failed due to manufacturing defects.

Let’s send it!

I’m so excited to see what everyone does with their ADSBee! Join the party on Discord and tell us what you’re building with your receiver.