Download data packs
Pick what you fly with. Every pack is content-hashed and the catalog is signed — your EFIS verifies it before installing.
How to use these on the Pi
- Over the air (simplest): on the device run
pyefis-data update— it pulls and verifies everything you’ve opted into. No download here needed. - USB / offline (hangar with no Wi-Fi): select packs above, click Download selected — it grabs the packs plus the signed manifest.json and manifest.json.minisig. Put them all in a folder named makerplane-data/ on a USB stick, plug it into the Pi, and it imports and verifies automatically (or run
pyefis-data import /path/to/makerplane-data).
Where this data comes from
No secret sauce. Here is every source and exactly what we do to it.
| Data | Source | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Airports & runways | FAA NASR (US Gov, public domain) | Fetch the 28-day NASR CSV subscription; join the APT base/runway/runway-end tables into an indexed SQLite database. |
| Obstacles | FAA Digital Obstacle File (US Gov, public domain) | Parse the DOF (towers, antennas, stacks…) into a spatially-indexed SQLite database, on the 56-day cycle. |
| Terrain | Copernicus GLO-30 (ESA/Copernicus, redistribution permitted) | 30 m (1 arc-second) global elevation — including high latitudes SRTM cannot provide. Converted from the Copernicus GeoTIFFs to standard HGT tiles, grouped by region, and zipped. |
| Water | OpenStreetMap (ODbL) + Natural Earth (public domain) | Coastline and inland-water polygons, stored in an R-tree SQLite database for fast lookup. |
| Roads | OpenStreetMap (ODbL) | Major highways (motorway/trunk), line-simplified (Douglas–Peucker) and stored in an R-tree SQLite database. |
How packs are made trustworthy. Every pack is hashed with SHA-256. The catalog (manifest.json) lists those hashes and is signed with an ed25519 key (minisign format); the device verifies the signature and each hash before it installs anything — a bad or tampered download can never replace good data. The whole pipeline is open source: makerplane-data and pyEfis.
For Experimental / Amateur-Built use. This data is provided as-is with no warranty and must not be used as a primary navigation source. You are responsible for keeping current data — the EFIS annunciates when a pack has expired, but verify against official publications.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Contains modified Copernicus data. FAA data courtesy of the U.S. Government.