Totem-Air

Totem-Air is a custom drone Remote ID monitoring system that passively captures identification and position broadcasts, decodes them, and presents them on a live operations dashboard for event and festival use.

Drones are required to broadcast identification and position data, but event and festival operators still need a practical way to see who’s flying, where they are, and whether a flight is authorized — especially when multiple production drones and unknown aircraft share the same airspace.

The sensor runs on a Raspberry Pi 5. It listens in Wi-Fi monitor mode — 2.4 and 5.8 GHz, hopping channels — and over BLE, then decodes ASTM F3411 and DJI Remote ID with Python parsers I wrote. Each fix is stamped with GNSS from an NMEA serial feed and shown on a live operations dashboard, including a noncompliance flag when a broadcast doesn’t check out.

The work spanned the full stack: radio behavior and antenna placement at the bottom, signal decoding and protocol work in the middle, and backend plus interface design at the top. The UI includes a live map for show operations, a registry of previously identified drones, and a flight history page that can replay a full flight and its data.

Reliable capture in a noisy RF environment meant careful antenna placement and receiver design. Supporting both the open standard and DJI’s format required separate parsers that still fed one consistent data model. The dashboard had to stay usable for ops teams in the field — live map, history replay, and drone registry — without becoming cluttered during a busy show.

During testing, Totem-Air was evaluated alongside systems used by other agencies and recognized for stronger capability at lower cost. It has run at about five shows so far, flagging dozens of unauthorized flights while helping keep authorized production drones deconflicted. From a single receiver it has tracked aircraft out to about 5 km. Development continues toward fuller integration into festival operations.