Do you live near an active water way? Have you ever wondered what kind of ships are off in the distance? You could find out using a standard called AIS, or Automatic Identification System. It's a worldwide radio system used by larger ships to broadcast their name, position, speed and more. These messages can be decoded using simple Python code and is a cool weekend project if you have some extra CPU resources. To do this project, you will need a Software Defined Radio or SDR. The easiest way to get this is to buy a cheap RTL-SDR device on Amazon and plug it into a Raspberry Pi. Once you have those two pieces of hardware, simply connect the SDR into one of the USB ports and place the included antenna near a window with a good view of the harbor. The first step to actual capture these packets is to download a package called RTL_AIS. You can follow these steps: apt-get install rtl-sdr apt-get install librtlsdr-dev git clone https://github.com/dgiardini/rtl-ais cd rtl-ais make Once y
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