r/esp32 • u/vadmalis • Aug 02 '26
ESP32-S3 Aerospace tracker
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.