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…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town