Notta mihinä se lentää? ESP32-S3 · 800×480LIVE

Live flight-tracking display

Notta mihinä se lentää?

Finnish for “So, where's that one flying to?”

A 7" touchscreen that shows the planes flying around you. Tap one to see where it's going, how high and fast it is, and a photo of the aircraft. It runs on a single off-the-shelf ESP32 board.

Try it in the browser Source on GitHub
  • 7" TOUCH · 800×480
  • UPDATES EVERY 4 S
  • NO SOLDERING
  • EN / FI
The display in its 3D-printed case, showing a flight from Stockholm to Oulu in dark mode

01 · Features

What it does

It uses the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7 and free community flight data. The screen is in English, and can be switched to Finnish.

Map with planes around Helsinki

01

The map

Positions update every four seconds, and the planes keep moving smoothly in between. The map has coastlines, lakes, towns, airports and runways, and you can drag and pinch from a single airport out to the whole world.

Colour is altitude:groundcruise
A selected plane with its route and photo

02

Tap a plane

You get the route, an arrival estimate, altitude, climb rate, speed, heading, distance and aircraft type, and the map draws the path it has flown since take-off.

The photo comes from Planespotters.net, with the photographer's name and a QR code that opens the photo page on your phone.

Looking for a particular flight? The magnifier finds it anywhere in the world by flight number, callsign or registration, and the map follows it.

Zoomed out over the Baltic Sea

03

English or Finnish

The whole interface and the map labels switch between the two, number formats included. Units are up to you too: km or nautical miles, km/h or knots, feet or metres.

The settings screen with the dark mode switch

04

Dark mode

Amber and green on near-black, so it doesn't light up a dark room. Keep it on all the time, or let it switch at sunset and back at sunrise, worked out for where you live.

Setting home with a crosshair on the map

05

Setting home

On first start it asks where home is. Type an address, pick the result (it uses OpenStreetMap's search), then drag the map until the cross is on your house.

The logbook: today's passes by hour and the all-time counts

06

The logbook

Every aircraft that passes near home is counted: how many went by today and when, the closest pass, the rarest type, and all-time numbers. A plane that has never been by before gets a green NEW on the map.

With a micro SD card in the back of the board, each month is saved as a file that opens in Excel, and the counts survive restarts.

The settings page on a phone

07

Settings from your phone

Wi-Fi is set up on the touchscreen. Everything else can also be changed from a small web page on the device: home, night hours, photos, language and units, and an optional AirLabs key for timetable data. Its address and a QR code are in the device's settings.

It's meant to run for months without attention: it reconnects after power and router cuts, restarts itself if something hangs, and turns the screen off at night.

02 · Build

Building one

No soldering. You need the board (touch version), a USB-C cable and a 5 V phone charger.

  1. Install the Arduino IDE 2 with the ESP32 board package 3.x and the libraries Adafruit GFX and ArduinoJson.
  2. Open SkyTracker/SkyTracker.ino, set the board options from the guide (16 MB flash, OPI PSRAM, custom partitions) and upload.
  3. Pick your Wi-Fi and home on the screen.

Read the guide

03 · Case

Case

Renders of the 3D-printed case

A printable case in three parts: a frame for the screen, a back plate that screws onto the screen's own standoffs, and a fold-out kickstand that leans it back 20°. All the screws are at the back, and the USB-C ports are reached from the side.

It prints without supports. There's a STEP file if you want to change it in your own CAD program.

Case files and print guide