Flight Tracker CYD

A standalone flight radar for the Cheap Yellow Display (ESP32-2432S028R, 2.8" 320x240 touch). It pulls nearby aircraft straight from the free adsb.lol community ADS-B feed over WiFi and draws them on a sweeping radar scope. No antenna, server, or other hardware needed.

• Green radar scope with a rotating sweep, range rings and a north mark
• Aircraft drawn as amber arrows pointing along their track; between updates they glide forward using their ground speed, so the scope stays smooth
• Side panel for the nearest plane (or the one you tap): flight number, route, airline, aircraft type, altitude, speed, distance and bearing
• Routes come from adsbdb (callsign to origin/destination), cached on the board
• − / + buttons zoom the range through 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 nautical miles; the choice is saved across power cycles

Hardware

Any ESP32-2432S028R "Cheap Yellow Display" (the version with the ILI9341 screen and XPT2046 resistive touch). Plain ESP32, 4 MB flash. The ESP32 only does 2.4 GHz WiFi.

Build and flash

Uses PlatformIO.

pio run -t upload --upload-port COM4    # your serial port

Setup: WiFi and location

The board needs your WiFi and the spot to center the radar on. Two ways:

Option A: settings file (easiest when flashing from a computer). Copy include/secrets.example.h to include/secrets.h, fill in your WiFi name and password and your latitude/longitude, then build and flash. secrets.h is in .gitignore, so it never gets committed.

To get coordinates: in Google Maps, long-press your location and copy the two numbers. West longitudes are negative.

Option B: phone setup page. Without secrets.h (or if its WiFi fails), the board opens a hotspot called FLIGHT-RADAR-SETUP. Join it from your phone, open http://192.168.4.1 (turn mobile data off if the page won't load), choose Configure WiFi, pick your network, and fill in latitude, longitude and radius on the same page. Pasting both coordinates into the latitude box (40.7128, -74.0060) works too.

To reopen the setup page later, hold a finger on the screen while plugging the board in, and keep holding for 3 seconds.

Using it

Action	Result
Tap a plane	Shows its details in the panel
Tap empty scope	Back to auto (nearest plane)
Tap − (bottom-left of the scope)	Zoom out
Tap + (bottom-right of the scope)	Zoom in

Press firmly: the resistive touch ignores very light taps.

The status line at the bottom of the panel shows how many aircraft are in range (3 IN 25NM). It turns red with NO SIGNAL if the feed hasn't answered for two minutes.

Notes

• adsb.lol asks for a user agent with contact info and rate-limits busy clients. The board polls every 30 seconds and backs off for a minute if it gets HTTP 429. If you fork this, change USER_AGENT in include/config.h to your own contact.
• HTTPS certificates aren't checked (setInsecure); the data is public and read-only.
• At 100 nm near a major airport the reply can be large for the ESP32's memory; the board keeps the nearest 40 aircraft.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Libraries pulled in by PlatformIO (TFT_eSPI, ArduinoJson, WiFiManager, XPT2046_Touchscreen) keep their own licenses.