Sometimes we’re most taken by what’s on the screen; sometimes the screen itself is the most interesting part of the project. In this case, it’s the latter. That’s no slight against [Virtual-Bet-4566], whose ESP32-based flight tracker looks very nice– but a big part of what it makes it so nice is that it’s displaying the ADS-B flight data on an old green-phosphor monitor from the Apple II days.
He’s using an ESP32-WROOM-32, which gives him both the wifi connection needed to grab aircraft locations and flight details– including photos of individual aircraft, when available from Planespotters.net– but crucially has an 8-bit digital-analong-converter that he’s using to drive the composite input on the old Apple monitor. Not all of the expansive ESP32 family have that feature, but at this point you might as well call ESP32 a brand of MCU than a family given the vast differences between them. Since composite video doesn’t need much power, he’s connected the dev board directly to the monitor. It’s that delicious combination of the old and new that really gets us vibing.
It can show you an image of the plane, but it’s not exactly high-def.
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Speaking of vibing, yes, this whole thing was vibe-coded, as [Virtual-Bet] freely admits in the Reddit thread. LLMs seem to be really good at making these flight tracking apps, to judge from other posts on that site, but this one stands out for its display method. He’s also apparently got weather and his own local sensor data incorporated in the wifi-controlled display application, and isn’t interested in sharing the code since you could prompt it yourself. Fair enough.
We’ve seen composite-out from the ESP32 family before, more than once— which is probably how the LLM knew to pull it off–but there’s just something about that green glow.
Story via CircuitDigest.