Man devises genius airplane tracker for his house near LaGuardia Airport

Jeremy Merrill lives underneath a flight path to LaGuardia Airport in New York. Merrill is a curious man.

After watching countless planes land at LaGuardia and wondering where they were flying from, the New York Times journalist/developer devised a system to display the plane's origin on his windowsill.

See also: Inventor pitches detachable airplane cabin to save lives during crashes

The software he created, called Flyover, basically takes a bunch of information that airplanes are transmitting via their transponders, runs it through a couple different programs, then displays the origin airport of "that plane flying over my apartment RIGHT NOW."

Every few seconds, passenger jets broadcast information about themselves over radio systems, called ADS-B and Mode S.

Contained in the information are the plane's location, altitude, registration number and flight number. Merrill collects this information using a SDR antenna.

Popular flight-tracking tools and apps like FlightRadar 24 and Flight Aware also use such transponder information to help track flights around the world.

Flyover uses the program Dump1090 to collect the information that airplanes are releasing. This is then translated onto a webpage, where flights are tracked and displayed on a map.

Merrill excluded flights that are flying at above 10,000 feet, since those are unlikely to be landing at LaGuardia since the airport is so close to where he lives.

From there, Merrill's contraption analyzes the flight numbers to determine the plane's route, using Virtual Radar Service.

Once the route is established, it's just a matter of displaying the origin airport on the LED display in Merrill's windowsill.

The LED screen works as a sort of "ambient notification," constantly connecting Merrill to what's happening in the skies above him.

"I really like building ambient/automatic notifiers for myself, to protect against my own absentmindedness," Merrill told Mashable. "For instance, a computer sends me an email each morning telling me which subway to take based on delays — so I don't have to remember to go to the MTA's status page. I also have a computer that predicts (using machine learning and the city's BusTime API) when a bus near my apartment is about to arrive, then notifies me with red and green lights to tell me when to go catch it."

The system he rigged up could, at least in theory, be used to also identify the type of the aircraft and the airline, as well.