ADS-B Scope puts live aircraft tracking on a handheld ESP32 board

John Stockdale's open-source firmware connects a LilyGO board directly to an RTL-SDR; he is now building a contributor-fed live map and says a stripped-down version can run on about $50 of hardware.

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Primary source: Reddit

Why it matters

ADS-B Scope collapses a Raspberry Pi-style radio stack into a touchscreen RISC-V board, showing how capable low-cost embedded hardware has become for local signal processing.

A person's hands are typing on a keyboard, with a notebook open displaying handwritten notes and a coffee cup beside it.

John Stockdale released ADS-B Scope, open-source firmware that turns a LilyGO T-Display-P4 development board and an RTL-SDR radio dongle into a standalone aircraft tracker. The on-device interface displays nearby aircraft, callsigns, altitudes, speeds, positions, range and bearing without sending the receiver's data through a laptop or internet service.…

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