Local receiver
Your own dump1090, readsb, PiAware or FR24 feeder, read straight off the LAN. Refreshes about once a second, costs nothing, isn't rate limited, and has no aggregation delay — you see exactly what your own antenna sees.
OPXHardware Project
microradar — a 240 × 240 scope for the sky above you
An ESP32 with a round LCD that draws the aircraft around you as a radar sweep, fed by your own ADS-B receiver or by a public network. Flash it below straight from this page — no toolchain to install.
ESP32 · esp32dev240×240 round LCDLovyanGFXMIT
microradar is an open-source project by Anthony Sturdy, MIT licensed. This page hosts a build of it and a browser flasher for convenience — the firmware is theirs, not mine.
Flash it from here
Your browser talks to the ESP32’s bootloader over USB directly. The firmware image is read from your own disk and written to the board — it is never uploaded anywhere, and this page has no server behind it doing the work.
Where the aircraft come from
Three feeds, chosen on the device’s own configuration page. Two of them can be paired: set a primary and the firmware falls back automatically when it stops answering, with a status dot on the scope to say which one is live.
OpenSky Network
The free community network. Global coverage without a receiver of your own, at the price of a slower refresh and whatever the network happens to have merged for your patch of sky.
Flightradar24
A paid API key. The firmware stretches its own polling interval to stay inside a monthly credit budget you set, rather than burning the allowance in a fortnight.
Setting it up
First boot
With no WiFi stored, the device raises its own setup portal — join that network from a phone and give it your credentials. It remembers three networks and tries each in turn at startup, so a board that moves between home and a club night does not need reconfiguring.
Everything else
Once it is on the network the device serves its own configuration page at microradar.local. Set your latitude, longitude and the radius of sky to watch, pick a data source and enter any keys it needs. Saving restarts the board.
Three display switches live there too: the sweeping scanlines, the aircraft triangles, and the info text. Turn the sweep off and the scope goes quiet and still — which some people prefer on a desk.
The firmware images
The build the flasher writes, published as files. Download them to flash with esptool or PlatformIO instead, or to check what the page is about to put on your board. Built 2026-08-02 — PlatformIO 6.1.19 · Arduino ESP32 · board esp32dev.
Redistributed under the MIT licence, copyright Anthony Sturdy — the licence travels with the binaries.
| Image | Offset | Size | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| firmware.bin The radar itself. This is the only image that changes between releases. | 0x10000 | 1265.6 kB | 2d812787865c607fc38cd6b31611b20e20825f180c9f661ad0f537b83828c695 |
| bootloader.bin Second-stage bootloader. Only a board that has never been flashed needs it. | 0x1000 | 17.1 kB | 3d234a7471f67b013686dabd4dee7c1fa915c9928463616a94bc9297acf1abf8 |
| partitions.bin The huge_app layout this build is linked against — one 3 MB app slot, no OTA pair. | 0x8000 | 3.0 kB | aaae2888c5a6a348004b5b436f47abb25ae32e72d9003902955a998eda723edd |
| boot_app0.bin Points the bootloader at the first app slot. Stock Arduino-ESP32 file. | 0xe000 | 8.0 kB | f94c5d786a7a8fab06ac5d10e33bf37711a6697636dc037559ea19cc410a17f0 |
Flashing these by hand
esptool.py --chip esp32 --baud 921600 write_flash \
0x1000 bootloader.bin \
0x8000 partitions.bin \
0xe000 boot_app0.bin \
0x10000 firmware.binBuilding the firmware
You do not need to — the published build above is ready to write. But the source is the point of a project like this, and changing it is the reason the flasher will take your own images as readily as its own.
pio run # builds into .pio/build/esp32dev/
pio run --target upload # or flash directly over USBA board that has been flashed before only needs firmware.bin — the bootloader and partition table do not change between builds unless the partition scheme does. A brand new board needs all four images, at the offsets the picker already knows.
Built and hosted by 2E0JWR. The same receiver feeds a live map of what is overhead on this site. Looking for the SSTV software instead? Open Signal is over here.