ESP8266 Plane Spotter Color

This is the repository of the ESP8266 Plane Spotter Color. It downloads data from web APIs and displays aircrafts close to your location on a map.

Hardware

This code is made for an 240x320 65K ILI9341 display with code running on an ESP8266. Since it was sometimes complicated to find the right parts I created a kit which contains all the parts including the connector PCB: https://blog.squix.org/product/esp8266-wifi-color-display-kit-2-4 By buying the kit from me you are supporting future development. Thank you!

The related blog post

https://blog.squix.org/2017/01/esp8266-planespotter-color.html

Video

Features

• Beautiful startup splash screen
• Automatic geo location by using WiFi scanning. List of visible SSIDs identifies your location
• Automatic download of JPEGs from MapQuest
• Detailed information about the nearest aircraft
• Flight track: last 20 waypoints per aircraft displayed

Planed Features

• Enable touch screen
  • Zoom in/out by button
  • shift map center
  • call location service again
  • select aircraft of interest
• only download map if center of map, scale or map type changed

Known Issues

• Flickering with every update: not enough memory for frame/ double buffering
• Sometimes waypoints get lost
• Encoding problems when displaying airport names containing non-ASCII characters (e.g. Zürich)

Hardware Requirements

This project was built for the following hardware:

• ESP8266 Wifi chip, especially with the Wemos D1 Mini, but all other ESP8266 modules should work as well.
• ILI9341/ XPT2046 TFT display with touch screen.

Since it was sometimes complicated to find the right parts I created a kit which contains all the parts including the connector PCB: https://blog.squix.org/product/esp8266-wifi-color-display-kit-2-4 By buying the kit from me you are supporting future development. Thank you!

Optionally you can get the connector PCB in the kicad sub directory. This allows for a easy soldering

Wiring/ Schema

If you are currently prototyping this shows how to setup the connections for the above mentioned ILI9341 display

Libraries

Install the following libraries:

WifiManager by tzapu

Json Streaming Parser by Daniel Eichhorn

![Json Streaming Parser] (images/JsonStreamingParserLib.png)

JPEGDecoder, fork by Frederic Plante

This is (not yet?) available through the library manager. You have to download it from here and add it to the Arduino IDE https://github.com/fredericplante/JPEGDecoder

Attention: You'll also have to open User_config.h in Arduino/libraries/JPEGDecoder-master and change

#define USE_SD_CARD
//#define USE_SPIFFS

into

//#define USE_SD_CARD
#define USE_SPIFFS

Adafruit GFX by Adafruit

Credits

This project wouldn't be possible if not for many open source contributors. Here are some I'd like to mention:

• Frédéric Plante for his adaptations of the JPEGDecoder library
• tzapu for the WifiManager library
• Rene Nyfenegger for the base64 encoder I got from here: http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/cpp/common/base64.html
• Adafruit for the ILI9341 driver and potentially also for the original designs of the TFT display