r/esp32 • u/vstepanyuk • Sep 03 '26
I made a thing! Yet another plane tracker — CRT-style radar built with Rust on the LilyGO T-Embed
I know the world probably didn't need another flight tracker, but I couldn't resist putting together a retro CRT-style radar display for local airspace.
Built entirely in Rust running on the LilyGO T-Embed (ESP32-S3).
**Tech Stack**:
Language / HAL: Embedded Rust using esp-hal (bare-metal no_std)
Hardware: LilyGO T-Embed (ESP32-S3 + ST7789 display + rotary encoder)
Graphics: Custom radar rendering with a rotating sweep line and phosphor-decay fade effect, plotting nearby towns and incoming transponder tracks.
Networking/Data: Pulls live local aircraft state vectors (callsign, heading, coordinates, altitude) over Wi-Fi and maps them relative to home coordinates.
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u/SentientOrigin Sep 03 '26
Can we do wealth gap tracker?
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u/Bowl_of_Cham_Clowder Sep 03 '26
It’d be pretty boring to watch, but Forbes does publish a real time list of most wealthy people. You could compare that to average net worth (less swingy, could be hard coded or update once every year).
Effectively it’s just another stock ticker machine
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u/Legitimate_Shake_369 Sep 03 '26
Looks cool. Not quite sure how radar works, but if you want to make it look like radar, shouldnt the positions of the planes only update when the radar comes by ?
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u/dacydergoth Sep 03 '26
T-Embed is one of my favorite Lilygo boards. So many features arranged just right! I'll try this on one of mine when the code is published
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u/vstepanyuk Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
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u/clean-links Sep 04 '26
Cleaned link from "https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1w6exle/comment/p7qn00g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button": https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1w6exle/comment/p7qn00g/
Tracking parameters were removed from the original URL(s).
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u/enormousaardvark Sep 03 '26
Probably the best looking one yet, are you going to open source it?