Skylight is an open-source project that uses a Raspberry Pi, a $30 RTL-SDR radio dongle, and a ceiling-mounted projector to decode live ADS-B aircraft signals and display real-time flight paths — along with stars, planets, and even the ISS — directly onto your ceiling. And yes, you can build one yourself for under $300.
Official Raspberry Pi channel: See Skylight in action — a real-time aircraft ceiling projection built with Raspberry Pi 5, RTL-SDR, and a projector. (Credit: Raspberry Pi / YouTube)
What Is Skylight?
Created by Bay Area software engineer Cameron Paczek, Skylight is an MIT-licensed open-source project that went viral in early June 2026 after a Reddit post in r/raspberry_pi. The concept is simple but stunning: a small projector mounted on a shelf or ceiling shoot projects a real-time, 60 FPS display of every aircraft flying overhead — complete with type-specific glyphs, altitude-graded color trails, and live airport runway positions.
But Skylight doesn't stop at planes. It also renders the entire visible sky — sun, moon phases, bright stars, constellations, naked-eye planets, and satellites including the International Space Station — all updated live from TLE orbital data. The result is a hybrid planetarium and air traffic control dashboard that turns an ordinary ceiling into something extraordinary.
Within weeks of its release, Skylight racked up over 3,000 GitHub stars, was featured by Tom's Hardware, Hackaday, XDA Developers, BGR, and Adafruit, and spawned a waitlist for a crowdfunded ready-made kit at skylightceiling.com.
How Does It Work?
Skylight combines three technologies into one seamless experience. An RTL-SDR Blog V4 software-defined radio dongle tuned to 1090 MHz captures ADS-B signals broadcast by every commercial aircraft every second. A Raspberry Pi 5 decodes these signals using FlightAware's dump1090-fa and renders the visualization through a React + Canvas frontend running at a smooth 60 FPS. Finally, a 1080p projector beams the result onto your ceiling.
For testing or apartment dwellers without line-of-sight to an antenna, Skylight also works with a free web API — just set DATA_SOURCE=api and it pulls live data from airplanes.live. This makes the project accessible even if you don't own an SDR radio yet.
Hardware You'll Need
The complete build costs around $260–$300, and most components are off-the-shelf. Here's the full parts list as confirmed by the project's README:
Total: ~$260–$300. A cheap native-1080p LED projector works great in a dim room — no short-throw needed for an 8 ft ceiling.
Setting Up the Software
The software stack is refreshingly modern. Skylight uses TypeScript, React, and Vite for the frontend canvas renderer, with a Node.js/Express backend that serves WebSocket connections for live data. The build system uses pnpm workspaces, and everything runs on a standard Raspberry Pi OS install.
Getting started takes about 15 minutes if you already have a Pi set up:
Install dump1090-fa from FlightAware's repository to decode ADS-B signals from the RTL-SDR dongle.
Clone the Skylight repo from GitHub and run pnpm install to install dependencies.
Set your location — Skylight supports city/airport search, browser GPS, or manual lat/lon coordinates. The default airport layer loads SFO, but you can set any ICAO code via OurAirports data.
Fire it up — pnpm dev starts the renderer. For a headless Pi appliance, the repo includes a Docker setup and a configuration guide for boot-time auto-start.
Skylight also works on older Pi hardware. The Pi Zero 2 W or Pi 3B can handle display-only mode at 30 FPS using the web API. The Pi 4 handles local radio decoding plus display. For the full experience — including the optional PTZ sky camera tracker — you'll want the Pi 5 (8 GB).
Projector Mounting and Ceiling Calibration
Getting the projection right is surprisingly simple. Paczek recommends a native 1080p LED projector — not a short-throw model, just a regular one placed on a shelf or mounted upside-down from the ceiling pointing upward. The built-in rotation and mirror calibration tools in Skylight let you adjust for the projector's angle and distance, so the display aligns perfectly with your ceiling dimensions.
For the best results, use a rotating 1/4-20 thread stand (the same standard used by camera tripods) and mount the projector about 2–3 feet from the ceiling surface. A dimmed room dramatically improves contrast for the sky layer.
Customization and Advanced Features
Skylight packs a surprising amount of depth for a project that's barely a month old. The phone control panel works over your local network — adjust themes, toggle sky layers, change radius (3 miles default), or switch between location profiles without touching the Pi.
Three built-in themes let you change the visual style instantly: Ambient for a subtle living-room display, Telemetry for data-heavy viewing, and Focus for a clean aircraft-only view. All settings persist across reboots.
For the truly ambitious, Skylight supports an optional PTZ sky camera with ADS-B-driven auto-tracking. The system uses a classical blob detector plus an optional YOLOX-Nano neural network (~3.5 MB ONNX model) for visual confirmation of aircraft flyovers. It even self-calibrates the mount from every locked pass.
The Crowdfunding Kit
If building from scratch sounds daunting, Paczek is working on a ready-made crowdfunding kit. The waitlist is already live at skylightceiling.com, and the open-source MIT license ensures the DIY route stays free and accessible regardless of whether the commercial kit ships. This dual approach — free for builders, pre-built for everyone else — mirrors what we've seen with successful open-source hardware projects like FlowLauncher and Instatic, which both grew vibrant communities around open-source tools.
In a tech landscape dominated by AI announcements and large language models, Skylight is a refreshing reminder that hardware hacking is alive and well. It's a project that makes you look up — literally. Whether you're an aviation enthusiast, a Raspberry Pi veteran, or just someone who wants a conversation piece for your living room, Skylight delivers a genuinely magical experience for a remarkably low price.
As Tom's Hardware and Hackaday both noted, the project's true genius lies in its simplicity: it takes a well-understood technology — ADS-B radio decoding — and adds a display format that nobody had thought to try. It's a particularly fitting application when you consider how AI is now designing radio chips that surpass human engineers — we're living in an era where both the radio hardware and the software to make it magical are advancing at breakneck pace. Sometimes the best innovations aren't new inventions at all, but new perspectives on what we already have.
Featured image: Screenshot from the Skylight project by Cameron Paczek (cpaczek), showing live aircraft flight paths and night sky projected onto a ceiling. Hardware setup photo by cpaczek. Images used under MIT License from the Skylight GitHub repository.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a short-throw projector for Skylight?
No. According to the project's creator, a cheap native-1080p LED projector like the Yaber Buffalo Pro U9 (~$150) works great in a dim room. You don't need a short-throw model — a regular projector placed on a shelf or mounted 2–3 feet from the ceiling works perfectly. The built-in rotation and mirror calibration tools handle alignment.
Can I run Skylight without an RTL-SDR radio dongle?
Yes. Set DATA_SOURCE=api in the configuration and Skylight pulls live ADS-B data from the free airplanes.live API. This is perfect for testing, apartment dwellers without line-of-sight to an antenna, or running on older hardware like the Pi Zero 2 W or Pi 3B at 30 FPS.
How much does a complete Skylight build cost?
A full build costs approximately $260–$300. The breakdown is: RTL-SDR Blog V4 ($30), Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB ($80), native 1080p projector ($150), and micro-HDMI cable plus stand ($30). You may already own some of these components if you're a Raspberry Pi enthusiast.
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