Launch!
Yet another ADSB display… with a bit of a twist, hopefully.
DeskRadar64
Real-time local ADS-B aircraft tracking on a 64x64 LED matrix display.
DeskRadar is a hardware and software system that reads aircraft data from a local dump1090 ADS-B output and renders nearby aircraft tracks on a 64x64 RGB LED matrix. The Raspberry Pi runs a FlightAware Pro Stick SDR, a USB software-defined radio receiver, display calculation software and support services. An Adafruit MatrixPortal S3 drives the HUB75 matrix over HTTP. Why HTTP?
The main display shows each aircraft as a colored track. Position is mapped from latitude and longitude to matrix pixels, altitude is mapped to color, trails fade as the track ages, and duplicated pixels are collapsed so the highest aircraft wins when multiple points land on the same pixel. A 16x2 I2C LCD shows status messages and the current closest aircraft callsign/altitude.
Get a DeskRadar
Buy the enclosure from the store and source your electronics from the bill of materials, or print the housing yourself and build from scratch.
Latest Update
Featured Guide
Initial Setup
Join the DeskRadar setup AP, open the web configurator, update your settings, and save them.
AI Transparency
The deskradar and deskradar-pi-services Python codebases were written by me, with AI used mostly for bug finding, code review, and help on some maths-heavy bits cos I'm rubbish at that.
The deskradar-matrixportals3 CircuitPython firmware was more heavily AI-assisted because CircuitPython was less familiar, but I still reviewed everything to the best of my ability.
This documentation site was written mostly by AI with my review & edits. AI did a pretty terrible job but, better than me writing frontend!