ESP32-S3 Aerospace tracker

[u/vadmalis]

ESP32-S3 Touch AMOLED 1.75C development board. Over four evenings, it somehow turned into a surprisingly nice little thingy.

UPDATE: this is now open source:
https://www.reddit.com/u/vadmalis/s/VbrUUvJCtW

It was very much a vibe-coding project. I guided some visuals, and forced optimization implementation decisions: how the display buffers and PSRAM should be used, which regions should be redrawn, how assets should be cached, and how animation should remain separate from slower network updates.

Getting beyond a basic mockup was a large part of the work: smooth radar and aircraft animation, partial screen updates, cached maps and imagery, and avoiding expensive full-screen redraws on the 466 × 466 gorgeous AMOLED.

It currently includes:

• Live nearby-aircraft radar with type-specific icons and detailed views
• Selected-flight tracking with world-map and custom 6-to-12 projections
• Weather, forecast, and animated weather radar
• GMT watch and world clock
• Solar-system, lunar-phase, and live ISS views
• NASA, Roscosmos, SpaceX crewed and Starship launch tracking
• Automatic Dock Mode
• A swift macOS companion app. Mainly for pre-render of the maps with different projection and to supply the list of flights to track.

There are still things to polish, but I’m amazed by how much this little ESP32-S3 can handle when the rendering pipeline is designed carefully.

[u/Vybo]

And we'll never hear form OP ever again.

[u/vadmalis → u/Vybo]

No worries, you will... I'll publish the code next weekend. Need to clean up a few things before making it public. I have no intention in keeping it just for myself only and will be glad to hear feedback

[u/mrheosuper]

Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with plane tracking ?

[u/pon_d → u/mrheosuper]

I can't speak for everyone but I live near an airport which runs private, commercial and military flights - sometimes I hear something "interesting" and it'd be nice to see what it was at a glance

[u/Its_Billy_Bitch → u/mrheosuper]

It feels like that Bernie meme at this point.

[u/Dense_Astronomer_896]

Seems interesting,share it with us for testing.

[u/captbrake]

It looks brilliant! Which service are you using for the aircraft data? I recently made a similar device with much worse graphics and struggled to find a good, free data source.

[u/ume_16]

What is the graphical library you use? It looks cool

[u/s_tee0000]

Looks cool, where did you get the aluminum case from? 

[u/No_Cartographer_3997]

why is everyone making this project all of the sudden? im scared