Home Assistant Bot tracks planes flying over my house
I have a small Home Assistant Bot running on my own Fediverse instance. It sends me private messages about what's happening around the house. At some point I thought: why stop at lights and energy monitoring when I can do more fun things by connecting different APIs?
So I connected the bot to Flight Radar.
What it does
Whenever a plane flies over my house on its approach to Amsterdam Schiphol, the bot sends me a (Dutch) private message on Mastodon with all the details:
- The airline and flight number
- Origin and destination
- The altitude at which it's passing
- The expected arrival time at Schiphol
Why the Fediverse?
- Because I could.
- I already run a Mastodon instance for our household, so the Fediverse was a natural fit. The bot posts directly to my account as a private/direct message, which means no extra apps, no push notification service to maintain — just a message popping up in my timeline like any other. It keeps everything self-hosted and under my control, which fits perfectly with the spirit of both Home Assistant and the Fediverse.