Telegram 1090

An airplane tracking bot that supplies users with data from a dump1090 datasource.

Read more about my setup on my blog: https://tyler.nien.house/2019/06/whats-that-plane-i-hear-telegram1090/

1. Setup/Installation

RaspberryPi/Raspbian

1. Install dump1090 - FlightAware's fork of it is available through their official Raspbian repo. You can follow the instructions on their site, skipping the PiAware installation and going straight to the dump1090-fa installation. The great thing about the FlightAware fork is it automatically runs at boot and provides a nice web UI to check your data.
2. Install Node.js 10 or newer - If the required version isn't included in Raspbian's default repos, you many need to either get it directly from the Node.js website, from NodeSource's binary packages, or using nvm.
3. Clone this repo to a convenient location - git clone https://github.com/flakeparadigm/telegram1090.git
4. Prepare the configuration - copy config.json.example to config.json and updated the values where necessary. Primarily the home lat/lon and telegram token.
5. Run the bot in the foreground - npm start in the repo directory.

Running as a service

1. Build the TypeScript code for direct use with Node - npm run build in the repo directory.
2. Prepare the systemd service unit file by copying telegram1090.service.example and updating the User, Environment=PATH and WorkingDirectory lines.
3. Copy or symlink this updated file - sudo ln -s telegram1090.service /lib/systemd/system/telegram1090.service
4. Test the service to make sure it's working:
   • Trigger a systemd reload of services for new/changed service files - sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   • Try to start the service - sudo systemctl start telegram1090
   • Check the status of the service - sudo systemctl status telegram1090
   • Check the logs - journalctl -fn 20
5. Enable the service sudo systemctl enable telegram1090
6. Reboot and check check the status of the service to ensure it started up properly

Removing the service

1. Disable the service - sudo systemctl disable telegram1090
2. Remove the service unit file - sudo rm /lib/systemd/system/telegram1090.service

Updating

If updates are availble, simply git pull origin to update your local repo, run npm run build, and restart the service sudo systemctl restart telegram1090 or reboot.

2. Bot notifications

After you have the service running, you'll need to start a Telegram chat with the bot and subscribe to the notifications using the subscribe command.

Commands

subscribe

Subscribes you to the notification messages and must be done before the bot is able to send you any messages. The service saves any subscribed chats to a file perioditcally, so it should be able to maintain the chats between restarts.

unsubscribe

Removes your subscription to the notification messages. After running this command you should no longer receive any messages from this bot.

status

Respons to you with your current subscription status without changing it.

Extra reading

• How Flightradar24 (and other similar sites) works. https://habr.com/en/post/440596/
• Introduction to ADS-B. https://www.icao.int/APAC/Meetings/2012_SEA_BOB_ADSB_WG8/SP01_AUS - ADS-B Basics.pdf (Copy and paste this including the spaces. Their site has some struggles with escape characters in URLs)
• Telegram Bots. https://core.telegram.org/bots
• Creating systemd services. https://www.linode.com/docs/quick-answers/linux/start-service-at-boot/