# Overhead paints the planes over your house onto e-paper

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.

- Category: Interface (build)
- Device: [Seeed reTerminal E1004](https://afterware.xyz/d/seeed-reterminal-e1004)
- Made by: [dmellok](https://github.com/dmellok) on GitHub
- Original: https://github.com/dmellok/tesserae-widget-overhead
- On Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/overhead-paints-the-planes-over-your-house-onto-e-paper

## Can I build this?

- Difficulty: Beginner
- AI-buildability: 5/5 (It's all software: widgets on a Tesserae server calling a public ADS-B feed, a photo lookup and an image model API, displayed on an off-the-shelf e-paper panel.)
- Time: A weekend
- Cost: $150–220
- Parts: 4.3in e-ink display (400x300)
- Tools: Tesserae server, e-paper panel

Estimates based on the original write-up. How the AI-buildability score works: https://afterware.xyz/ai-buildability

## 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.
```

## 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

- [Repository](https://github.com/dmellok/tesserae-widget-overhead)
- [Tesserae server](https://github.com/dmellok/tesserae)
- [Fugleramme packers](https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme)
- [fal.ai keys](https://fal.ai/dashboard/keys)

Tags: e-paper, adsb, generative-art, planespotting, tesserae, fal.ai

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