Old Tech Gets an Aerospace Upgrade

Just because hardware is a couple generations old doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful. Don’t believe me? Then check out Filip Grace’s latest project and you will. He used a 10-year-old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B — which is ancient in the world of computing — to build a beautiful International Space Station tracker that would look great displayed in any home, and there is plenty of compute power to spare.

Grace’s project turns the aging single-board computer into a dedicated real-time space dashboard. The device renders a rotating 3D globe on a compact 3.5-inch LCD, continuously showing the current position of the ISS as it orbits Earth at roughly 17,500 mph. The display also overlays telemetry such as latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, and the region of Earth currently beneath the spacecraft.

The screen itself is a plug-and-play SPI display HAT from Waveshare that mounts directly onto the Pi’s GPIO header using pogo pins. That means the hardware setup is extremely simple — no breadboards or complicated wiring required. The only optional addition is a physical toggle switch wired to a GPIO pin. Flip that switch, and the display changes modes.

Instead of showing the orbiting station, the alternate view lists the astronauts currently living and working in space. The data is pulled from free public APIs, including one that tracks the ISS position and another that lists active astronauts and their spacecraft assignments. Grace wrote the entire application in Python, but he notes that users don’t need to know how to code to run it — installation instructions and configuration files are included in the project’s GitHub repository.

The hardware enclosure gives the tracker a distinctive aesthetic inspired by aerospace instrumentation. The housing itself is 3D-printed, but the front panel is CNC-machined from aluminum. After experimenting with a raw metal look, Grace ultimately painted the faceplate white so a custom waterslide decal — complete with the worm logo from NASA — would stand out more clearly. The result resembles a small module that might belong in a mission control console.

There are a few clever touches in the build process as well. For example, Grace used the heated chamber of his 3D printer as an improvised paint-curing oven, speeding up the finishing process by running a filament-drying cycle for several hours.

The software is designed for continuous operation. A background service managed by systemd automatically launches the tracker when the Pi boots and restarts it if anything goes wrong. The program also caches pre-rendered globe frames so the device can start quickly after its first run.

Grace admits the tracker doesn’t serve any practical purpose — but that doesn’t matter. Like many great maker projects, it began as an excuse to experiment with spare hardware and interesting APIs. The end result is a stylish little space monitor that proves even decade-old tech can still reach orbit in the right hands.