This should be the easiest and cheapest way to build a flight tracker system. Maker from the Youtube Channel - Tech Talkies recently built this incredible DIY flight radar that runs entirely on an ESP32-S3 Zero, a round GC9A01 display and a rotary encoder. All the parts assembled onto a custom made 3D printed enclosure. Instead of capturing radio waves locally, it connects to his local Wi-Fi network and pulls real-time aircraft data directly from the OpenSky Network API which is free to use. It even predicts plane movements between updates and displays them on the smooth animated radar interface
Features include live aircraft tracking, detailed aircraft information and multiple aircraft color coding. This DIY Flight Radar can be considered as one of the ultimate weekend projects for aviation geeks and embedded developers. Projects like these prove how powerful and compact microcontrollers like ESP32 can be. Links to the firmware, github repo and OpenSky API are also available for anyone who wants to build one.
