Travel Globe

This started as a one-day project where I decided to combine several of my favorite hobbies into a single idea. I love to travel and capture everything I see both through my drones and camera. After each trip, I usually make a video to share with others. I’m also passionate about home automation. So, in this project, I brought all of these together.

At first, it was just a local, self-hosted “travel checklist” in the form of a 3D globe. Later, I decided to make the page public so I could access it easily and let others try it too.
That’s when I added a backend, Google login, and MySQL database allowing each user to have their own list of visited countries and personal settings.

The goal was to create a local, self-hosted interactive "travel checklist" in the form of a 3D globe. When someone opens the webpage (or in my case, scans an NFC tag), they see a spinning Earth showing all the countries I've visited and how many times. Clicking a country opens a popup with links to my Instagram story highlight and YouTube videos from that location.

All links are easily configurable via the countries.json file.

• Interactive 3D globe showing visited countries
• Country popups with Instagram and YouTube links
• Automatic light/dark mode based on time of day
• Home Assistant integration to cast YouTube videos directly to a TV
• Toggle between opening YouTube in browser or casting to TV
• Multi-user support with individual travel lists and settings (v2)
• Google authentication for secure login (v2)
• Simple admin interface to manage visited countries and links (v2)
• Designed to run smoothly even on a Raspberry Pi

Frontend:

• React
• react-globe.gl
• Home Assistant API
• JSON / REST API

Backend (v2):

• Node.js 
• MySQL (data storage)
• Google OAuth 2.0 for authentication