I'd like to share one of my latest projects with you. It is a little tool which helps you identifying airplanes in a certain geo-fenced area. I use it to get model, origin and destination of airplanes which I see starting or landing from my dining table. It is designed for the Arduino IDE/ Platformio and fetches data from adsbexchange.com. In case their data coverage is not sufficient in your area you can contribute by adding an transponder signal receiver on the cheap with an Raspberry Pi and a $10 RTL-SDR TV dongle.
Please find a (relatively) detailed description here:
http://blog.squix.org/2016/07/esp8266-based-plane-spotter-how-to.html
Cheers,
Daniel