Joseph Little's DeskRadar64 Puts an LED Matrix Twist on Desktop ADS-B Visualization

System administrator Joseph Little has designed a desk accessory that visualizers live air traffic via ADS-B capture and decoding — but instead of the usual radar-like display, shows it on an LED matrix as colorful paths of light.

"DeskRadar64 is a[n] LED matrix display of live local ADS-B data," Little explains of the project. "That means it does not require any APIs [Application Programming Interfaces], or even the internet. Theoretically you could plug it into a portable power brick and GPS unit and walk around with it? The idea has been suggested by multiple test users. I thought this could be a pretty cool way to make your home feeder a bit more interesting, or just as a cool desk gadget for av-geeks."

The desk accessory is based on the reception and decoding of Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) signals transmitted by aircraft, using a FlightAware Pro or other receive-only software-defined radio (SDR) for the former and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer for the latter. So far, so standard — but most ADS-B projects then take that data and visualize it as an old-fashioned radar tube.

Not so the DeskRadar64: despite its name, the device ditches the usual LCD panel with radar-like graphic in favor of a 64×64 matrix of RGB LEDs, connected to the Raspberry Pi via an Adafruit MatrixPortal S3 board, visualizing the path of detected aircraft as colorful lines. For those looking for more information, a two-line character-based LCD sits beneath the matrix displaying flight details. Everything is housed in a 3D-printed frame, angled for comfortable viewing.

"This is my first project of this kind, and before I started I knew nothing about 3D modelling, Raspberry Pis, Linux, [Espressif] ESP32s, electronics, firmware creation, and many more things," Little explains. "I come from a background of DevOps/sys admin. I could code in Python and know my way around a terminal but that was about it in terms of relevance for this project."

Source code for the project, which its creator admits is mostly the output of a large language model (LLM) on the microcontroller side, has been published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license, with build instructions and a downloadable operating system image — based on the outdated Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, rather than the latest Raspberry Pi OS Trixie — are available on the DeskRadar website; 3D print files are available on Printables at $40 under the Standard Digital File License.