Building a Standalone LED Flight Tracker with Raspberry Pi Pico W

After implementing the web-based map and database query engine, I wanted a dedicated physical display that I could glance at without needing to open a browser. Today, I finished setting up and configuring a standalone flight tracking appliance that shows the 10 closest flights to my house in real-time.

Here is the finished project running on my desk:

I intend to 3D print a custom case for this hardware and hang it up in the sunroom so I can easily see what is flying directly over our house.

The Hardware Stack

To build this standalone appliance, I used the following components:

• Microcontroller: Raspberry Pi Pico W (handling Wi-Fi connections and display driver logic)
• Interface Board: WatangTech RGB Matrix Adapter Board. This ensures the shared power supply provides the right voltage to the pico and the matrix display. It also cleaned up the wiring.
• Display Panel: Waveshare RGB 64x32 4mm Pitch LED Matrix Panel
• Data Source: My local ADS-B receiver/server running tar1090 to serve the live aircraft telemetry data.

Software & CircuitPython

For the software platform, I used CircuitPython as the operating system on the Pico W.

To develop and test the code:

1. I used the Thonny IDE on my main computer to edit and test the Python scripts over a USB connection.
2. Once verified, the Pico W runs entirely standalone.
3. On the Pico W, the CIRCUITPY drive is structured as follows:
   • code.py: The main script that handles connecting to Wi-Fi, making HTTP requests to fetch aircraft.json from the local tar1090 server, sorting the aircraft by distance, and rendering the closest one. This runs automatically on boot.
   • lib/ folder: Contains the required CircuitPython libraries like adafruit_requests (for networking) and adafruit_display_text (for drawing fonts on the LED matrix).