Parts list
Everything below is what a working receiver is actually made of. The proven line on each is the exact hardware running in production and reporting to this service — not a guess at what should work.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Links marked Where to buy are affiliate links — they cost you nothing extra, and they do not affect what is listed here: every recommendation is hardware we actually run.
Any Pi that runs 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. A 4 should be enough — we have only run this on a 5, so treat that as untested rather than endorsed. A Zero 2 W is likely underpowered once both radios are decoding at once.
Must report Bluetooth 5.0 or later and support extended advertising. This is the specification people get wrong: a 4.x dongle pairs normally, reports no error, and silently misses most drones, because Remote ID is broadcast on extended advertising that 4.x cannot see.
Must support monitor mode, which most adapters do not. It has to be a second adapter — monitor mode takes the interface off your network, so it cannot be the one carrying your connection.
One per radio. Getting the antennas away from the Pi body is the single cheapest sensitivity gain available — a Pi radiates broadband noise from its CPU, SD card and USB controllers, straight into the 2.4 GHz band both radios listen on. USB 2.0 specifically: see below.
Already in the CanaKit starter kit linked above — buy these separately only if you are starting from a bare Pi. The official Pi 5 supply, and a 32 GB or larger A2-rated card. An underpowered supply shows up as USB devices dropping off the bus at random, which reads as a software fault and is not one.
What not to buy
Already have hardware?
You don't need any of this. Anything that can decode Remote ID and make an HTTPS request can report to CieloTrack — the API and full field reference are on the build page.