Capsule Radar 🛩️

_{A real flight on the device: callsign, type, altitude/speed, route (Lisbon → Abu Dhabi) and the aircraft photo — all looked up automatically.}

A live ADS-B aircraft radar for the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75 — a round 466×466 AMOLED with capacitive touch. It pulls nearby aircraft from a free online feed over WiFi and plots them on a touch radar scope centered on your location, with live flight details and 19 selectable visual themes.

Themes

Long-press the screen to cycle (right half = next, left half = previous), or pick one on the web page — your choice is remembered across reboots. All 19 render on the same engine; several add their own touches (Mission Control's starfield, CIC's vector plot, Saber's dual sweep, Browncoat's targeting reticle, LCARS chrome, Reverie's drifting stars).

Phosphor	Orb	Amber CRT	Military	Vice
Midnight	Silent Running	Mission Control	CIC	ClaudeIC
Borderlands	Aliens	Mass Effect	Top Gun	Firefox
Saber	LCARS	Browncoat	Reverie

_{Captured from the bundled desktop simulator (--themes mode). The device screen is round; the square corners are off-panel.}

Features

• Live traffic from airplanes.live (free, non-commercial; fallback adsb.lol), updated every couple of seconds. Memory-safe streaming parser with a hard aircraft cap.
• 19 themes, cycled by long-press (right = next, left = back) or the web page, remembered across reboots. Aircraft glyphs rotate by heading and colour-code by altitude, with fading trails, a fade-in on new contacts, and a pulse/red halo on emergencies. Some themes add per-theme flourishes — ATC leader lines, altitude-scaled glyphs, aircraft silhouettes, chevrons, or diamonds.
• Touch (CST9217): tap an aircraft → detail card (callsign, type, altitude, vertical speed, ground speed, distance, heading, squawk, and origin → destination looked up from adsbdb, cached in NVS). Swipe between Radar / List / Stats (circular layouts).
• Motion gestures (QMI8658 IMU): shake to refresh, auto-rotate so the scope stays upright whichever side the USB-C is on, wake on motion, and face-down sleep (flip it over to blank the screen). Each is toggleable on the web page.
• Sound & alerts (ES8311 speaker): a distinct synthesized cue per event — a soft ping for a new contact, a sonar ping for inbound proximity, a low swell for military, a klaxon for emergencies — plus a full-screen red-alert flash. Volume, mute, alert mode and a proximity trigger are on the web page.
• Airports on the scope: larger fields as a labelled ring (IATA), smaller ones as a quiet diamond.
• Smooth motion: glyphs glide between polls (interpolated) using cheap partial redraws instead of jumping.
• Top HUD: WiFi status (amber if the feed is failing), in-range count, NTP/RTC clock, battery % (charging bolt, red when low), and the date.
• Battery aware (AXP2101): shows charge, warns when low, and slows the feed poll on battery to save power.
• Real-time clock (PCF85063): keeps time/date across power loss — the clock is right even before WiFi — re-synced from NTP when online.
• Smart brightness: configurable idle auto-dim plus face-down sleep.
• GPS auto-location (optional -G board with the Quectel LC76G): turn it on and the radar sets its own centre point, with an on-screen satellite icon (amber acquiring, green on fix). Standard boards enter their location manually.
• Configuration web page at http://capsuleradar.local/ — a grouped, collapsible page: Location & Range · Appearance · Traffic & Filters · Motion · Sound & Alerts · Time & System. Most settings apply live (with a "Saved ✓" confirmation) — theme, brightness, filters, sound, motion, time zone — while only the centre point + range need a restart. Includes a map picker, browser-detected time zone, WiFi reset, and over-the-air firmware update. Everything persists in NVS.
• First-boot WiFi setup via a captive portal (CapsuleRadar-Setup).

Hardware

Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75: ESP32-S3R8 (8 MB PSRAM, 16 MB flash), CO5300 AMOLED over QSPI, CST9217 touch, QMI8658 IMU, PCF85063 RTC, AXP2101 PMIC, ES8311 audio + speaker, microSD. All pins are in src/config.h (sourced from the board definition; no guessing).

Flash from your browser (easiest — no toolchain)

Flash without installing anything using ESP Web Tools (Chrome or Edge on desktop):

1. Open the web flasher.
2. Plug the board in with a USB-C data cable and click Install.

That's it — on first boot, connect your phone to the CapsuleRadar-Setup WiFi, enter your home network and your location, and real aircraft appear within seconds. (Erasing on install clears saved WiFi/location, so you'll re-run that one-time setup.)

Build & flash (PlatformIO)

pio run -e esp32-s3-amoled-175 -t upload     # build + flash over USB-C
pio device monitor -b 115200                  # serial log

On first flash you may need to hold BOOT then tap RESET. Then follow the same one-time WiFi + location setup as above.

The browser flasher is built and published automatically by GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/webflasher.yml) on push to main (Pages → Source = GitHub Actions). Tagged releases also attach a ready-to-flash .bin to a GitHub Release.

Desktop simulator

The whole UI is portable LVGL and runs on your computer (SDL2) — great for iterating without hardware:

pio run -e native -t exec           # opens a 466×466 window (needs SDL2: brew install sdl2)

Mouse = touch · T = cycle theme · close the window to quit.

It also has two headless capture modes (used for this README's gallery):

.pio/build/native/program --themes docs/img/themes/gal   # one clean shot per theme
.pio/build/native/program --shot   docs/img/shot         # radar / list / stats views

Configuration

Browse to http://capsuleradar.local/ (or the device IP) on the same WiFi. Change the theme, brightness, filters, sound, motion and time zone and they apply immediately; the centre point (map picker) and display range save-and-restart. WiFi reset and OTA firmware update are at the bottom.

Repo layout

src/
  config.h           pins + tunables (Dénia, Spain by default) + FW_VERSION
  main.cpp           tasks, WiFi/NTP, chunked web config page, brightness/IMU glue
  display.*          CO5300 (Arduino_GFX) + LVGL bring-up
  radar_view.*       the radar scope, aircraft, sweep, blip FX
  theme_table.*      the 19 themes (descriptor table)
  ui.*               views (radar/list/stats) + detail card + HUD + touch handlers
  motion.*           IMU gestures (shake / auto-rotate / wake / face-down)
  audio.*            ES8311 alert-sound synthesis
  airports.*         airport markers (ring + IATA / diamond)
  touch_cst9217.*  imu_qmi8658.*  battery.*  rtc_pcf85063.*   device drivers
  adsb_client.*      airplanes.live fetch + parse
  route*.*           origin→destination lookup (adsbdb)
  sim_main.cpp       native SDL simulator (not flashed; --themes / --shot capture)
include/lv_conf.h    LVGL config (v8)
web/flash/           browser web-flasher (ESP Web Tools, self-hosted for locked-down networks)
docs/                hardware / data-source / architecture notes + img/

Credits, data & license

Based on the original Capsule Radar by socquique — this is a personal fork that adds the extra themes, motion gestures, sound, and the redesigned config page. Firmware / code: MIT — fork and build on it freely (keep the notice). Aircraft data: airplanes.live (free, non-commercial / educational — exactly this project; be polite with request cadence). Routes: adsbdb.com (free). The 3D-printed enclosure is on MakerWorld.