You, too, can build this ESP32 e-ink display that shows the planes flying over your home
No more running into the garden.
The world of tinkering has seen a surge of interest in airplane tracking recently. Alongside this, there has been a growing trend of e-ink displays that showcase birds in the vicinity. One ingenious individual has taken these interests to the next level by combining them. The user xDaftTurtle, on the ESP32 subreddit, has unveiled a new project.
Their previous work involved running the Inky Impression off a Pi Pico Plus 2 W on battery power, which was quite impressive. Now, they have developed a module for their e-ink dashboard software, Tesserae. This innovative project merges the captivating bird picture frames with the increasingly popular planespotting projects.
The module is designed to gather public flight data for planes flying within a certain distance from the user's home. It then generates a visual representation of the plane on the display. The size of the plane image is directly related to the wingspan of the aircraft, with larger wingspans resulting in larger images. Users have the flexibility to customize how the planes appear.
The illustrations are pre-painted once per airframe from credited planespotters.net photos and can be selected from 26 different styles, including vintage airline poster, engraving, woodblock, risograph, pixel art, and watercolor. Additionally, there's an option to display the photos themselves. To explore further, interested individuals can visit the Overhead Tesserae GitHub page for comprehensive details and instructions on setting up the project.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.