Radar for Presto

With a side of aircraft and flight trackingA couple of weekends ago, I ended up looking on Etsy at little widgets that showed a radar display, centred on a location, showing what was overhead. “These seem nice”, I thought, “but I don’t have the money at the moment to justify one”.What I did have was a Pimoroni Presto, a “desktop companion” with a 4" 480x480 display, powered by a RP2350 microcontroller, with wifi, bluetooth, and sundry other niceties. It’s programmed in MicroPython, which is like the mainstream CPython, but cut down to deal with running on a 150MHz CPU with about 512KB of RAM. (So it’s about the speed of a 1996 PC with the memory of one from 1988.) With Claude’s help, it was satisfyingly quick to get to a proof of concept.ALTHowever, it turned out that making this nicer is a lot of work. It’s all doable, but still, it’s work. For example, adding airports, or a vector coastline - you know, useful ground references (and scale). Or switching to a map mode, which involved…