Hacking a desktop ADS-B radar from an ESP32 and a round LCD

A weekend build turns an ESP32-C3 and a 1.28-inch circular display into a live aircraft radar that pulls nearby ADS-B traffic and plots each plane by distance and bearing. Assembly took roughly 15 minutes of light soldering, and flashing the firmware was near-instant thanks to ESPHome’s browser-based web flasher. The one rough spot was the popular Makerworld enclosure: its tolerances were too tight for the author’s batch of boards, forcing a fallback print and plans to model a custom case.

The more substantial work went into forking and extending the open-source Plane Radar firmware, done with AI-assisted “vibe” coding. The fork adds real flight context — origin and destination airports where available, with callsign as a fallback, and more specific aircraft types (B737-800 rather than just B737). It also layers on local weather, temperature, humidity, and time/date, plus a web UI that can edit coordinates and toggle units, runways, and display options without wiping the Wi-Fi config. Text is larger by default with an adjustable scaling slider.

Notably, the firmware now supports authenticated over-the-air updates, so future builds can be pushed through the browser instead of tethering the board over USB. Everything has been compiled, flashed, and tested on hardware and committed to the main branch. Next steps are porting the project to a larger display and designing a cleaner 3D-printed enclosure.