Cameron Paczek lives directly under SFO's approach corridor in San Bruno. His response was to build a system that projects those flights — labeled with airline, aircraft type, destination city, and miles-to-go — onto his ceiling in real time.

Paczek, a software engineer, designed the project using a $30 software-defined radio dongle, a Raspberry Pi, and a ceiling projector — hardware that most Bay Area tinkerers already own. He released the code publicly on GitHub under the name Skylight, where it has pulled in more than 2,600 stars and nearly 300 forks from builders around the world. A commercial kit is now in development, with a crowdfunding launch planned for later this year. NBC Bay Area first reported the project Thursday.

San Bruno sits beneath one of the busiest air corridors in the United States. On busy afternoons, jets stack up on final approach to SFO every 90 seconds, their contrails threading the same airspace for hours. Residents have filed noise complaints with airport authorities for decades. Paczek, who describes his build as "centered on San Francisco International (SFO)," built something different: instead of tuning out the noise, he turned the overhead traffic into a living installation.

How it works

Every commercial aircraft operating in U.S. airspace broadcasts a continuous ADS-B radio signal containing its position, altitude, speed, and identifier. The signal is unencrypted and receivable by anyone with the right hardware. Paczek's system decodes that signal using an RTL-SDR — a USB radio dongle originally designed for digital TV reception and repurposed by hobbyists for radio scanning — connected to a Raspberry Pi 5. A projector pointed at the ceiling renders each aircraft as a luminous glyph, moving at true speed and heading.

"A jet you'd hear overhead glides across your ceiling at the same moment — labeled with its airline, type, and where it's headed," Paczek wrote in the project's public documentation. "Pure-black background so the projector's rectangle disappears and only the aircraft (and stars) are lit."

The stars are literal. Skylight also renders the real sky layer behind the planes: sun, moon (with phase), bright stars and constellations, naked-eye planets, and live satellite positions including the International Space Station, all computed from the user's GPS coordinates and updated in real time. A phone-based control panel lets users adjust themes, filters, and star toggles without leaving the couch.

The entire rig — radio, Pi, and a budget 1080p projector — can be assembled for under $200. The project's GitHub README includes a detailed hardware guide and notes that "the included dipole is plenty — planes are nearly overhead."

Going viral, going commercial

The project was posted to GitHub earlier this month and quickly spread through maker and aviation communities. As of Thursday, it had accumulated 2,600 stars and 283 forks — numbers more typical of widely-used developer tools than a hardware weekend project. Contributors have already begun submitting improvements.

Paczek has launched a commercial counterpart at skylightceiling.com, where a waitlist for a ready-made kit is open ahead of a crowdfunding campaign. "We're building the kit now," the site reads. The project is MIT-licensed, meaning anyone can build, modify, or redistribute it regardless of whether they buy the kit.

The site's footer reads, simply: "built under the flight path."

A different kind of coping

SFO-adjacent communities — San Bruno, Millbrae, Burlingame, South San Francisco — have long organized around aircraft noise. Community groups have lobbied the FAA over NextGen routing changes that concentrated flight paths over previously quieter neighborhoods. Noise complaint portals run by the airport receive tens of thousands of submissions each year.

Skylight doesn't reduce the noise. But it does something unusual: it makes the overhead traffic visible, specific, and beautiful. A United 787 from Tokyo, 12 miles out, on a 4,000-foot final. A Southwest 737 departing for Las Vegas, banking left over Daly City. The ceiling becomes a kind of real-time atlas of where people are going.

The system works anywhere in the world — any ICAO airport code can be loaded for runway overlays — but it was built, unmistakably, for one particular neighborhood's particular sky.