PiLNK shipped v1.0 in early 2026 and is actively developed every week. Here's what's working right now:
Features in active development, expected in the coming weeks:
Debian Trixie support. PiLNK currently targets Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (64-bit), and the installer blocks Trixie (Debian 13) for now. As Raspberry Pi OS moves to Trixie, full support is in progress — until it lands, flash the Bookworm image with Raspberry Pi Imager.
Network map weather radar. Live rainfall and storm visualisation overlaid on the public network map so visitors can see what every node is flying through.
Day/night terminator overlay. A visible day/night boundary line on the network map, useful for context on transcontinental flights and 24-hour aircraft activity patterns.
Push notifications. Get watchlist alerts on your phone or desktop, not just in the dashboard. Configurable per category (military, emergency, type, callsign).
Military aircraft watchlists. Opt-in alerts for military aircraft activity, starting with US operations and expanding to UK and other countries. Built country-agnostic from the ground up.
More serialised badges. Tankers, fighters, bombers, special-mission aircraft — collect them with serial numbers that get rarer as they fill.
Larger features planned for the next few months:
Per-user privacy modes. Choose exactly how your node's location appears on the public map — precise, jittered (default), or city-level only.
Reliability improvements. USB dropout auto-recovery, photo-fetch resilience, smoother audio buffering.
More languages. Adding Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin to the existing six.
Hardware support expansion. Already running on Raspberry Pi 4/5 and AMD64 mini PCs — extending tested compatibility to ARM SBCs and used office hardware.
Achievement system v2. Class-complete mega-badges, branch-complete badges, and one truly legendary badge that may never be earned by anyone.
The bigger picture, in deliberately broad strokes:
PiLNK is built around the belief that aviation enthusiasts should own their own data, their own hardware, and their own community — not depend on commercial platforms that change terms or paywall features. Everything we ship moves toward that.
There are some features in the deeper roadmap that we're not ready to talk about publicly yet. When they ship, you'll know. Until then, the best way to see what's coming is to install PiLNK on your Pi and watch the changelog.
Two things matter most:
Use PiLNK — the more nodes online, the more data flows, the more we learn about what works and what's missing.
Post on the forum. Feature requests, bug reports, weird edge cases from operating in your part of the world — all of it shapes what gets built. Aviation isn't the same in Auckland as it is in Wichita or Felixstowe.