An ESP32 based plane radar for my desk

A tiny homemade screen that shows nearby planes was supposed to be a chill weekend maker win. And, to be fair, people did think it looked cool. The creator turned a cheap little board and round screen into a live desk display for aircraft overhead, then upgraded it with bigger text, weather info, flight origin and destination, and easier wireless updates. There was even a little side-quest drama about the pretty Makerworld case looking great online but being a pain in real life because the fit was too tight. Classic: gorgeous in photos, messy on the desk.

But the comments? Oh, the comments were locked onto one spicy issue: is this even a radar? One camp basically said, “Neat gadget, wrong name.” The strongest opinion by far was that this isn’t true radar because it’s not detecting planes itself; it’s pulling public flight data from the internet and drawing it on screen. That led to the thread’s most dad-energy correction spree: “radar-like display, then. But not a radar.” Another commenter twisted the knife with the even more precise “radar display,” while someone else jokingly escalated things by imagining an actual plane-finding signal blaster on a desk. Now that would be a Saturday project.

Not everyone came to nitpick, though. One commenter called it “amazing work,” and another offered a practical suggestion: why make users type in their location manually when the device could try to figure it out itself? So the vibe was equal parts praise, pedantry, and playful nerd bickering—the exact recipe for internet maker drama.