EDITIONS - ROADMAP - GET A KIT - ASSEMBLY - FIRMWARE - SETUP - THANKS
Valar Scopes is a line of small open-source gadgets for your desk: an ESP32-S3 driving a round touchscreen. The line comes in several Editions — and the trick is that they're all the same hardware. Each Edition is a separate firmware that turns the screen into a window onto a different stream of live data, and pings your phone when something notable happens. They all share the same Wi-Fi setup, web config page, persistent storage, over-the-air updates, and ntfy alerts — so once you know one, you know them all. You just flash the Edition you want.
| Edition | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| 📡 | Blipscope (the original — Aviation) | A live flight radar. Aircraft plotted around your location from public ADS-B data, with tap-to-inspect detail cards, a spotting logbook, and a "look up!" overhead alert. |
| 📟 | Missileer (HFGCS / EAM) | An HFGCS Emergency Action Message monitor. A command-console ticker of nuclear-command radio traffic, an activity gauge, Skyking codewords, an airborne-command-post watch, HF propagation, and ICBM-test windows. |
| 🛰️ | Orbitscope (Space) | Live space data. The ISS ground track, a T-minus countdown to the next rocket launch, and a geomagnetic aurora gauge, straight from free public APIs. |
| 🌐 | Quakescope (Seismic) | A live earthquake radar. Quakes plotted by bearing and distance from the keyless USGS feed, with magnitude rings, tap-to-inspect cards, and alerts for big, nearby, or tsunami-flagged events. |
| 🐦 | Quillscope (Birding) | A notable-sightings radar. Birds reported near you from eBird, on a tap-to-inspect radar plus rotating screens (notable ticker, day-list count, nearest hotspot, target species) — and a ping when a rarity shows up. |
| 🎣 | Reelscope (Fishing — the newest edition) | A fishing console for fresh water and salt. An on-device solunar "best bite times" band, plus live river gauges (USGS), tides and waves (NOAA), water temperature, and barometric trend — all keyless. |
All six run on the same Valar Scopes board; the Edition is chosen by the firmware you flash (and a kit can be re-flashed to a different Edition any time). More editions are on the way.
The original Valar Scope: a small flight radar that sits on your desk and shows live aircraft around your location in real time — pulled from public ADS-B data — so you can glance over and see what's in the sky above you, where it came from, and where it's headed.
- Live radar view — aircraft plotted around your location, with fading trails, type-aware heading markers (helicopters, gliders, and heavies each draw differently), and altitude-based colour coding.
- Tap to inspect — touch an aircraft to open a detail card with callsign, type, operator, registration, route, altitude, speed, and a photo. Pin one to keep tracking it.
- List & stats screens — swipe between the radar, a list of everything in range, and at-a-glance statistics.
- Spotting logbook — an optional persistent "lifelist" that tallies every unique aircraft type, airline, and country you've ever seen overhead, shown on the Stats screen, with a gold "NEW" flag on first sightings.
- Tail-number watchlist — get a phone notification (via ntfy) whenever a specific aircraft flies over.
- Emergency squawk alerts — highlights aircraft broadcasting 7500/7600/7700.
- "Look up!" overhead alert — flashes a cyan ring when an aircraft passes within a set distance of your location, so you can glance up and spot it for real, with an optional phone alert.
- Special-aircraft detection — flags military (orange "MIL", from the ICAO address), helicopters (violet "HELI", from the ADS-B category), and distinctive callsigns such as rescue/police/test flights (blue "SPC") — all worked out offline with no account or lookup needed, plus an optional phone alert when a military aircraft flies over.
- NTP clock & auto-dim — keeps accurate time and dims itself at night based on your local sunrise/sunset.
- Home Assistant / MQTT — optionally publishes a live summary (aircraft count, nearest flight, and overhead/military flags) to your MQTT broker, with auto-discovery so Home Assistant creates the sensors for you.
- Over-the-air updates — pulls new firmware automatically from GitHub Releases, so it stays current without plugging in.
- Configurable range & display — set your centre point and scan radius in km or miles, and toggle the on-screen elements you want.
The Setup & Usage section below — including the OpenSky and "run your own receiver" guides — covers Blipscope in full.
Flash the Missileer firmware and the same device becomes a desk readout for the U.S. Air Force High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS) and the Emergency Action Messages and Skyking broadcasts that move across it. (STRATCOM — U.S. Strategic Command — is the authority these messages are issued under.) Instead of plotting aircraft, the round screen becomes a command-console:
- a scrolling ticker of the latest EAM, broken into its phonetic groups;
- an activity tempo gauge — how busy the net is today versus normal;
- recent Skyking codewords, with the ones new to your device flagged;
- an airborne-command-post watch (is an E-4B "Nightwatch" / E-6B Mercury up right now?);
- HF propagation — the best frequency to listen on, with solar flux and K-index;
- the next ICBM-test ("Glory Trip") window, with a live countdown;
- and an idle Zulu (UTC) clock drawn as real seven-segment digits.
It reuses the same Wi-Fi setup, web config, ntfy alerts, and over-the-air updates as the radar, and runs on its own firmware update channel so the two never cross.
Flash the Orbitscope firmware and the device becomes a small mission console for the sky above you — talking directly to free, public space APIs with no backend and no API key baked in:
- an ISS tracker — a north-polar globe with the station plotted live, showing whether it's sunlit or in Earth's shadow, plus its altitude and speed;
- a launch T-minus screen — the next rocket launch with a big live countdown, provider, vehicle, mission, and pad;
- a geomagnetic Kp gauge — a 270° aurora dial (QUIET → G1–G5) with a recent-trend sparkline, so a glance tells you if tonight is worth looking up.
It pings your phone when a launch is imminent (T-10 / T-1) or the aurora is stirring (high Kp). Beyond the three above it has grown a whole console of screens — a Deep Space Network board, deep-space-probe distances, solar-flare activity, ISS visible-pass predictions, a star map, asteroid flybys, Moon phase, and eclipse countdowns. Next on the roadmap: a Skywatch sky-dome plotting every satellite passing overhead — bright passes and Starlink trains, not just the ISS — computed on-device from public orbital data. Same shared Wi-Fi setup, web config, alerts, and OTA as the other editions.
Flash the Quakescope firmware and the same device becomes a live earthquake radar — built on the same polar view as Blipscope (the Aviation edition), but plotting quakes instead of aircraft, straight from the keyless USGS feed (no account, no API key):
- Live quake radar — recent earthquakes plotted by bearing and distance around your location, sized and coloured by magnitude, with static range rings instead of a sweep.
- Tap to inspect — touch a quake to open a detail card with magnitude, depth, place name, and how long ago it struck.
- List & stats screens — swipe between the radar, a list of recent quakes, and at-a-glance statistics (largest today, counts by magnitude).
- Two queries at once — a worldwide "recent significant" view and a radius-bounded "near me" view, so distant big ones and small local ones both show up.
- Phone alerts — get an ntfy notification for a big quake anywhere, a quake near you, or any event carrying a tsunami advisory. Seeded at boot so the backlog never pings you.
It reuses the same Wi-Fi setup, web config, alerts, and over-the-air updates as the radar, on its own firmware update channel.
Flash the Quillscope firmware and the device becomes a desk window onto the birds being reported near you — live from the Cornell Lab eBird API. It's a hybrid of the two interface styles: a tap-to-inspect radar and a set of rotating data screens.
- Sightings radar — recent reports plotted around your location, with notable birds ringed in gold; tap any blip for a detail card (species, count, location, how long ago).
- Rotating screens — a notable ticker of recent rarities, a day-list species count for your area, your nearest hotspot, and a target species watchlist — auto-rotating, skipping any feed with no data, and swipeable by hand.
- Phone alerts — an ntfy ping the moment a notable bird is reported nearby, or when one of your target species turns up. Seeded at boot so only fresh sightings notify you.
- Bring your own key — eBird's API is free; you enter your own token on the config page (it's never baked into the firmware, and it's masked once saved). Nothing is polled until a token and a location are set.
Same shared Wi-Fi setup, web config, alerts, and OTA as the other editions, on its own update channel.
Flash the Reelscope firmware and the device becomes a fishing-conditions console for your water — covering both freshwater and saltwater, all from free, keyless public feeds. Pick your water type and stations in the web config; every dial can be toggled on or off.
- Freshwater (USGS) — river gauge height, streamflow (CFS) with a rising/steady/falling trend, water temperature, and turbidity where the site reports it — from the keyless USGS Water Services feed, keyed by your gauge's site number.
- Saltwater (NOAA) — tide state with a countdown to the next high/low, water temperature, and offshore wave height / swell period — from NOAA CO-OPS tide stations and NDBC buoys.
- Solunar bite windows — the day's major/minor feeding periods on a 24-hour band, computed on-device from the sun and moon for your location (no network) — plus barometric pressure + trend, moon phase, and basic weather.
- Hybrid interface — the enabled dials auto-rotate (skipping any with no data) and are swipeable; tap any dial to inspect it in a detail card.
- Phone alerts — an ntfy ping when a bite window opens, when your river crosses a flow threshold, or when the water temperature enters your active-feeding band. Edge-seeded at boot so the backlog never pings you.
No API keys, no account, no baked-in backend. Same shared Wi-Fi setup, web config, alerts, and OTA as the other editions, on its own update channel.
Every Edition is the same recipe: pick a free public data feed, draw a few glanceable screens, and wire up phone alerts — the Wi-Fi setup, web config, OTA, and ntfy come for free from the shared platform. That makes new Editions cheap to add, and there's a long list of streams that would look great on a round desk display. Some we're considering:
Things you plot around you (reusing Blipscope's polar radar view):
- 🔥 Wildfire Edition — active fire detections radiating around you from NASA's FIRMS satellites, with an "it's getting closer" proximity alert — for fire-season desks.
- 🚢 Maritime Edition — ship traffic (AIS) around a harbour or coastline, the radar's natural sibling for the coast.
Things you read as a dial or ticker (reusing the Orbitscope/Missileer rotating screens):
- ⛅ Weather Edition — local conditions, a "next rain" countdown dial, and a 36-hour forecast ribbon around the bezel, from the keyless Open-Meteo feed.
- 🌫️ Air Quality Edition — a glanceable AQI / UV / pollen dial, pinging you when the air outside turns unhealthy.
- ₿ Mempool Edition — live Bitcoin fees, block height, and network hashrate on a dial, from the keyless mempool.space API.
- 🚆 Transit Edition — a "leave now" countdown to the next bus or train from your stop.
- 📻 Ham Radio Edition — HF band conditions, solar flux, and live DX spots for radio amateurs, reusing Missileer's propagation feed.
Have an Edition you'd love to see — or a free data feed that belongs on a round screen? Open an issue and tell us.
The easiest way to build a Valar Scope is to grab a kit. It includes the display module, the redesigned enclosure parts, and everything else you need in one box — no hunting around marketplaces for the right components, and the hardware is guaranteed to match the firmware and the enclosure. The hardware is the same across editions; you choose which one to run by the firmware you flash, and you can re-flash to a different edition any time.
Buying a kit is also the best way to support continued development of the project. Thank you 🙏
The Valar Scopes enclosure has been completely redesigned, so the build steps live in the project wiki rather than here in the README:
The wiki walks through the full build with photos. We recommend skimming the Setup & Usage section below before you start, so you can test the hardware before everything is closed up.
Kits ship with firmware already flashed, and the device keeps itself up to date over the air. For most people there's nothing to install.
If you want to build from source or hack on it yourself, the firmware is here in this repo:
- Install VS Code with the PlatformIO IDE extension.
- Restart VS Code and open this repository folder — PlatformIO pulls in the dependencies automatically.
- Plug the board in via USB-C and hit the upload button (→) in the bottom status bar.
If the board doesn't reboot into the new firmware automatically, hold the BOOT button, press RESET once, then release BOOT. If an upload fails, double-check the board selected in the status bar, try a different USB port, and make sure your cable supports data (some USB-C cables are charge-only). More on PlatformIO here.
Each Edition is a separate compile-time build from this one repo, one PlatformIO env each (see platformio.ini). Pick the env for the edition and board you want:
pio run -e blipscope-s3-146 -t upload # 📡 Blipscope — Aviation, S3 1.46" AMOLED (default)
pio run -e blipscope-pro-s3-21 -t upload # 📡 Blipscope — Aviation, S3 2.1" RGB panel
pio run -e blipscope-eam-s3-146 -t upload # 📟 Missileer — EAM/HFGCS monitor, S3 1.46" AMOLED
pio run -e blipscope-space-s3-146 -t upload # 🛰️ Orbitscope — Space, S3 1.46" AMOLED
pio run -e blipscope-seismic-s3-146 -t upload # 🌐 Quakescope — USGS quake radar, S3 1.46" AMOLED
pio run -e blipscope-birding-s3-146 -t upload # 🐦 Quillscope — eBird sightings, S3 1.46" AMOLED
pio run -e blipscope-fishing-s3-146 -t upload # 🎣 Reelscope — Fishing (fresh + salt conditions), S3 1.46" AMOLEDThe product name, its build flag, and its env line up one-to-one (the env/flag names are unchanged from the pre-naming line-up):
- Blipscope = (default, no feature flag) =
blipscope-s3-146/blipscope-pro-s3-21 - Missileer =
FEATURE_EAM=blipscope-eam-s3-146 - Orbitscope =
FEATURE_SPACE=blipscope-space-s3-146 - Quakescope =
FEATURE_SEISMIC=blipscope-seismic-s3-146 - Quillscope =
FEATURE_BIRDING=blipscope-birding-s3-146 - Reelscope =
FEATURE_FISHING=blipscope-fishing-s3-146
Each non-default edition reuses the same boards, Wi-Fi setup, web config, and OTA, but compiles a different app and ships on its own OTA channel (firmware-<edition>-<slug>.bin), so a device only ever flashes the edition it was built for. Developer notes — including how to add a new edition or SKU — are in CLAUDE.md and RELEASING.md.
The first-boot Wi-Fi setup and the web config page work the same on every edition. The OpenSky and "run your own receiver" sections are specific to Blipscope (the Aviation edition); the other editions have their own settings (Quakescope and Quillscope, like the radar, take a Location for their range, Quillscope takes your free eBird API token, and Reelscope takes your water type plus its USGS gauge / NOAA station).
On first boot, your Valar Scope broadcasts its own WiFi hotspot. Each device has a unique name like Blipscope-A1B2C3 — the exact name is shown on the screen during setup. Connect to that hotspot from your phone or laptop and a configuration page appears automatically (open a browser if it doesn't). Enter your WiFi credentials and hit save; the device restarts and joins your network.
If the hotspot doesn't appear straight away, give it a moment. If it still hasn't shown up after 30 seconds, leave the WiFi settings on your device and go back in to force a refresh.
Once it's on your network, the config page is reachable from any device on the same network at the address shown on screen — http://<device-name>.local (for example http://blipscope-a1b2c3.local).
On Blipscope (the Aviation edition) you can set:
- Location (latitude and longitude) — the centre point of your radar.
- Radar radius — how far the scan extends, in km or miles (capped at ~222 km / 138 mi to stay within data rate limits).
- Data source — pull flight data from the OpenSky Network (the cloud default) or from your own ADS-B receiver on the local network (see below).
- Display options — toggle the on-screen elements and aircraft info fields.
- Watchlist & alerts — tail numbers to watch and the ntfy topic to notify, plus toggles to highlight military aircraft, helicopters, and special flights, and to alert when a military aircraft flies over.
- OpenSky credentials — your client ID and secret (optional, but recommended).
- Home Assistant / MQTT — broker address and port, optional username/password, base topic, and an auto-discovery toggle. When enabled, Blipscope publishes a retained
<base>/summary(and, with discovery on, the Home Assistant config so an "Aircraft in range" count, a "Nearest aircraft" sensor, and "Aircraft overhead" / "Military aircraft in range" binary sensors appear automatically).
The config page is available any time the device is on WiFi, so you can tweak settings whenever you like.
Blipscope uses OpenSky Network's free API for flight data. It works without an account, but making one (it's free) raises your daily request limit from 400 to 4000 — which lets Blipscope poll roughly every 22 seconds instead of every ~3.5 minutes, so the live view is far more accurate.
OpenSky moved to OAuth2 credentials in 2026, so you need a client ID and client secret (not your account username/password). To get them:
- Create a free account or log in at opensky-network.org.
- Open your Account page (top-right username menu → Account).
- Create a new API client.
- Note the two values:
- Client ID — shown on the account page.
- Client Secret — not shown on the page. A
credentials.jsonfile is downloaded to your computer containing both the client ID and secret. Open it in any text editor to copy them out.
- Enter both into the OpenSkyAPI Client ID and Client Secret fields on Blipscope's config page.
The secret only ever exists in that downloaded file — if you lose it, use Reset Credential on your OpenSky account page to generate a new one (this invalidates the old secret). Keep credentials.json private; treat it like a password.
If you run your own ADS-B receiver — a Raspberry Pi with dump1090-fa, readsb, PiAware, tar1090, or an ADS-B Exchange feeder image — Blipscope can read directly from it instead of OpenSky. Local data has no rate limits and refreshes about once a second, so the radar is smoother and more accurate, and works even if OpenSky is down.
A receiver is three things: an SDR USB dongle, a 1090 MHz antenna, and decoder software on a Raspberry Pi (any Pi 2 or newer — even a Pi Zero 2 W — is plenty; the decoder is light).
- Recommended starter: a Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 dongle plus a Nooelec 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna. Both ends are SMA, so they screw straight together with no adapter, and the pair runs well under the price of an all-in-one kit. In an RF-noisy spot you can add a 1090 MHz band-pass filter later, but try without one first.
- If you can find one — better filtering: a FlightAware Pro Stick Plus has a 1090 MHz filter + amp built in, so it shrugs off nearby noise. Pair it with the same SMA antenna above (no adapter needed). It's frequently out of stock, so don't wait on it if the Nooelec combo is available.
Avoid the RTL-SDR Blog V4 kit — its tuner chip was discontinued, so remaining stock sells at inflated prices. The RTL-SDR Blog V3 (still in production) is a fine dongle if you already have one, but you'd still need to add a 1090 MHz antenna.
The biggest factor for range is antenna height and sky view, not the dongle — a cheap antenna in an attic or upstairs window beats an expensive one on a desk.
For software, the quickest path is to flash the PiAware SD-card image: it bundles dump1090-fa, which serves exactly the feed Blipscope reads, and it earns you a free FlightAware account for feeding. Once it's running, check the receiver's map in a browser at http://<pi-ip>:8080/ to confirm it's seeing aircraft.
On the config page, set Data source to My own ADS-B receiver and enter your receiver's address in Receiver URL. You can type just the device's IP (for example 192.168.1.50) and Blipscope will assume the conventional /data/aircraft.json path, or paste the full URL if your setup serves it elsewhere (e.g. http://192.168.1.50/tar1090/data/aircraft.json). The receiver must be reachable on the same network as Blipscope.
PiAware / dump1090-fa serve the data on port 8080, so enter http://<pi-ip>:8080 for those — Blipscope appends /data/aircraft.json to give http://<pi-ip>:8080/data/aircraft.json. If in doubt, open the receiver's map in a browser and use whatever base address it serves from, with /data/aircraft.json on the end.
Altitudes and speeds in the receiver's feed are reported in feet and knots; Blipscope converts them so the display matches the OpenSky readings (metres and m/s). Aircraft outside your configured radius are filtered out the same way OpenSky bounds its results.
That's it — once configured, you'll have a live view of everything flying over your location. Enjoy
Valar Scopes is built on the wonderful Micro Radar project by Anthony Sturdy. Anthony designed and open-sourced the original device — the concept, the enclosure, and the firmware this project grew from. None of this would exist without his work, and we're hugely grateful he shared it with the world. Go give the original repo a star. 🌟
The original Micro Radar was itself inspired by therealhacksaw's desk radar.
Valar Scopes is maintained by Valar Systems.
Valar Scopes is released under the Open Community License (OCL v1) — see LICENSE for the full text. In short: as a non-commercial user you're free to use, copy, modify, and hack it however you like, and to share derivatives under the same share-alike terms. Commercial replication requires a separate business or repair license. The aim is to keep the project open and repairable while preventing straight commercial cloning. Learn more about the OCL here.