Got a free Saturday and a soft spot for aviation? Point a small antenna at the sky and watch planes pop up on a screen you wired together yourself. Adafruit's latest 3D Hangouts stream showed Pedro doing exactly that: a desktop flight tracker running on the Feather RP2350, complete with a lunar transit feature that flags when an aircraft is about to cross the face of the Moon.
What you would be building
The tracker listens for ADS-B signals that aircraft broadcast on 1090 MHz, decodes each plane's callsign, altitude, and position, then plots them on a color display. Pedro paired the RP2350 with the 3.5" TFT FeatherWing V2, a 480x320 touchscreen that stacks straight onto the Feather headers with no breadboard wiring needed. The lunar transit math is the fun part. The code cross-references plane positions against the Moon's azimuth, so you get a heads-up before a silhouette shot lines up.
The parts and the real cost
The RP2350 brings 8MB of PSRAM, which matters here because holding dozens of live aircraft tracks plus a framebuffer eats RAM fast. You feed it ADS-B data from a small SDR dongle tuned to the 1090 MHz band. Wiring is mostly stacking FeatherWings, though you will solder headers onto the RP2350 if it ships bare. Budget-wise, expect to spend a few thousand pesos on the Feather and TFT FeatherWing combo at circuit.rocks, plus an antenna and dongle you may already own.
