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An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk

264 points by alexktz

by MrGilbert

0 subcomment

Looks like several of these have come up in the past months, with the last one being a real product (that was on pre-order)
- https://makerworld.com/models/2872376-esp32-plane-radar-live... (referenced by the linked article)
- https://github.com/AnthonySturdy/micro-radar
- https://www.gadgies.co.uk/shop/p/product-3-szb2y-gzh2r-tzhkx...
Personally, I really like them. It's a nice gadget. :)

by freitasm

3 subcomments

Well, a radar-like display, then. But not a radar.

by scarecrowbob

1 subcomments

I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.
I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.
However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.
It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.
Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).

by NooneAtAll3

2 subcomments

radar *display*
making esp32-based radar emitter would've been cool, tho

by boguscoder

1 subcomments

Perhaps I didn’t read it thoroughly enough but it seems that lat/long of the “radar” are expected to be entered by user, I think using wifi positioning could be of great assist and could be done from mcu itself without involving web portal, though maybe portal already does it (didn’t get to see it)

by minute_man

0 subcomment

As I live on a widely used flight path, I also made one a while ago using a cheap ESP32 ($12) XiaoZhi AI display .
I made it multi-purpose by showing air traffic when a flight enters the selected airspace and when there's no new traffic, it defaults to showing my Claude usage and reset duration. It works with ESPHome and also has Home Assistant Voice Assistant as I wanted to experiment with fully local HA Assist.

by amatecha

6 subcomments

Looks pretty cool, though kinda "cheating" by pulling from adsb.fi - though I think you'd need something a lot more powerful than an ESP32 to receive and decode ADS-B ;)

by kruskakli

0 subcomment

Cool project! Funny how similar projects can pop-up at the same time; here is a somewhat similar project for identifying close-by flights, but this is a mobile app: https://github.com/etnt/skyoverhead

by iamwil

2 subcomments

What should an ESP32 with a display cost? It seems like the chip itself is a couple bucks, but the combo of ESP32 + display is around $40. Is there a way to do it cheaper? Put it together myself?

by andai

0 subcomment

That is so cool. I don't know what I would do with this but I want one!

by sneak

2 subcomments

ADS-B is not radar, despite ATC calling these sorts of things “secondary radar”.

by ustad

2 subcomments

“Finally, the firmware now supports authenticated OTA updates, so future builds can be installed through the browser instead of connecting the board over USB.”
What does that mean?

0 subcomment

by rbanffy

0 subcomment

It needs a 28 inch display.

by NNimaandi

0 subcomment

Its an amazing work

by westurner

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From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261684 :
> Can any aircraft navigation system plot drone Remote ID beacons on a map?
> How sensitive of a sensor array is necessary to trilaterate Remote ID signals and birds for aircraft collision avoidance?
Could aircraft locate birds with CSI Channel State Information?
> A Multispectral sensor array (standard) would probably be most robust.
I started working on adding weather over HTTP (or from a LoRA message from a sender key on an allow-list) to an ESP32-S3 with a 2" eInk screen with Meshtastic InkHUD. I got to testing the output on the SPI display and wrote a codec to do 1bpp 1Hz video on ESP32 and then added gaussian splatting and layers to the codec (which is brand new), so now on paper it says it can do 3D scene rendering from a configurable perspective and rescaling of normed 3x3 tensors for the display size (2x2 tensors for 2D). Haven't tested that yet but I did ask it to add sensor fusion to try to track viewer positions(s) with an Accelerometer or Ultrasonic (which this device doesn't have) or Wi-Fi CSI Channel State information. I started working on the codec, MAV (Mu Animation Video), in ffmpeg and haven't yet implemented enough device simulator pitch/roll/yaw buttons to complete testing of the 3D on ESP32 with gaussian splatting yet.
westurner/firmware: https://github.com/westurner/firmware/tree/add_weather_http_...
There's probably already a flight sim game or screensaver that will render on esp32? It looks like there are a few games in the meshtastic firmware for TFT screens but not for InkHUD eInk at 1 Hz (1 fps)

by holoduke

1 subcomments

These kind of project are now so easy. A few prompts and you have something like this. I did it with quite a few similar like projects. You can buy super cheap esps with integrated lcds for less than 20 dollars.

by hnc99rxjlw

0 subcomment

Simple but often overlooked

by sitzkrieg

0 subcomment

cool toy

by hyeongjun

0 subcomment

great work

by afdsaifdoi

0 subcomment

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by nicechianti

0 subcomment

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