Overhead paints the planes over your house onto e-paper

dmellokon GitHub

A Tesserae widget pulls live ADS-B traffic, grabs a photo of each airframe by registration, and has an image model paint it once in the style you pick. The cut-outs get packed onto an e-paper page.

Build sheet

Device page: Seeed reTerminal E1004 →

Can I build this?Beginner · AI 5/5 · $150–220

Difficulty: Beginner
AI-buildability: 5/5
Time: A weekend
Cost: $150–220

Parts

4.3in e-ink display (400x300)

Tools

Tesserae servere-paper panel

Starter prompt

Based on "Overhead paints the planes over your house onto e-paper" on Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/overhead-paints-the-planes-over-your-house-onto-e-paper

Write a Tesserae widget plugin that fetches aircraft within a radius of a lat/lon from the adsb.lol API every render. For each aircraft, look up its photo by registration and draw a packed layout of the photos with callsign, type and altitude captions, sized for a 1200x1600 e-paper panel.

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Story

Every refresh, the widget asks a public ADS-B feed what is overhead, looks up each aircraft's photo by registration, and sends it to an image model. The model repaints the airframe in a style you choose, from vintage airline poster to risograph to stained glass. The cut-outs get packed onto the page by their real outlines, so wings nest into each other's gaps.

The demo runs on a Seeed reTerminal E1004 (Spectra 6, 1200x1600) and shows 48 aircraft seen within 80 km in twenty minutes. Each painting costs about four US cents and is cached, so a plane that passes daily is painted once. Photos alone are free.

It's a set of four Tesserae widgets: Photo, Plate, Cluster and Scene. If you already run a Tesserae server and an e-paper panel, the photo widget works without any AI key, so you can start there.

Resources · 4

Repository Tesserae server Fugleramme packers fal.ai keys

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