How do you spend your time when you're twenty kilometres in the air, for eight hours straight?
With more than 93,000 commercial flights a day, that's a reasonable concern for a lot of aviation companies. In the Tulip Air project my team tackled it for a fictional airline by building a captive portal for passengers.
A whole cabin service on a Raspberry Pi
For budgetary and educational reasons, the whole portal runs on a Raspberry Pi. Passengers connect and land straight on the onboard portal, which bundles everything the flight offers into one place:
- Flight information, where you are and how long is left
- A digital onboard shop
- A film service for the long haul
- Several games
- Paid internet for anyone who really needs to be online
One admin environment behind it all
Every one of those features is managed from a single admin environment. Rather than five separate systems for shop, films, games, connectivity and flight data, the crew get one place to run the cabin's digital services, which is exactly what makes the whole thing deployable on hardware as modest as a Pi.
Fitting flight info, a shop, films, games and paid internet onto a single Raspberry Pi forced every part to stay lean, and the project was better for it.
Tulip Air was a first proper taste of building for a real-world constraint, limited hardware, a captive audience, and a genuine question to answer: what turns eight empty hours into a decent experience?