0.4.5: The community update

The community update. Nearly everything in 0.4.5 started as a report, a pull request or a hardware experiment by one of you. Update over the air from the web panel, or from the browser flasher.

Fixed

• Aircraft photos are back. planespotters.net now requires clients to identify themselves with a contact URL; every HTTP client in the firmware does exactly that. If your flight cards lost their photos recently, this is why, and this brings them back.
• Night mode can no longer trap the screen in the dark. A 7B owner reported the panel going black for the night and never waking again. Three stacked bugs: the 7B backlight-off path powered down the touch controller together with the backlight, the morning restore required the screensaver to still be up, and there was no recovery hook. Now any tap relights the panel, sunrise restore is unconditional, and switching night mode off in the web panel wakes it too.
• The rain radar on the screensaver actually updates. The weather frame was baked into the map when the screensaver opened and stayed frozen all night (#21). It now refreshes every 10 minutes and morphs in place without blinking.
• Local receivers speak both dialects. FR24 and PiAware feeder bundles serve the old dump1090 JSON schema; flights off such receivers showed 0 ft 0 kt (#17). Both key sets are parsed now, so altitude and speed come straight from your antenna.
• Aggregator order. airplanes.live gated its public API behind registration; it moved to the last fallback slot and adsb.lol leads. Failover already hid this from you, this just stops the dead request each cycle.

New

• Map outline under the retro radar sweep (optional, off by default): coastline and a faint land and water wash in phosphor green, so the blips have geography. Classified from the map tiles with zero per-frame cost, correct on every panel size. Contributed by @Ierlandfan, second board-grade contribution in a month.
• "Use local receiver" switch on the Integrations tab and in the web panel: flip between your antenna and the internet sources without wiping the saved URL (#17).
• Fahrenheit (#25): the Units dropdown grows an "Aviation (ft, kt, °F)" option, and the web panel a matching Temperature select.

Boards

• Sunton ESP32-8048S070 (7 inch) graduates from beta, with owner-confirmed colors (the R and B bus halves in the community pin map were swapped; the corrected bus turns out to be CrowPanel 7.0 wiring) and a centered display window. Both fixes bench-tuned by _LM_ from the forbot.pl forum.
• Elecrow CrowPanel 7.0 and its unbranded 7 inch Amazon rebrands graduate from beta (EK9716BD3 driver, 4 MB class), tester-confirmed.
• M5Stack Tab5: all three display generations supported. It turns out the Tab5 shipped with three different panels: ILI9881C, ST7123 and the newly discovered ST7121, which hides at the same I2C address as the ST7123 and needs its own timings and init path. The firmware probes the right one at boot. Solved through a memorable A/B/C test campaign with a very patient tester.
• BigTreeTech Panda Touch, tester-confirmed (2026-08-21): the Bambu printer pendant is a regular ESP32-S3 smart display underneath, with the pin map published in BTT's own SDK. The first build shook until the memory clocks matched BTT's firmware (PSRAM and flash at 120 MHz). Flashing replaces the stock Bambu-remote firmware; back it up first.
• Waveshare 7C / 7C BOX, tester-confirmed (2026-08-21, added post-release): the boxed 7 with moved G5/G6 data lines, I2C on 47/48 and the 7B-style IO helper. Clean on first flash. Both boards are on the main flasher page; `-7c` and `-pandatouch` assets attached to this release.

Coming next

0.4.6 is planned around physical controls (#13): buttons and rotary encoders over an I2C expander or free GPIOs, an HTTP input endpoint for custom decks, and a learn-mode mapper in the web panel.

4 MB boards (CrowPanel 5.0/7.0, Amazon rebrands): no OTA on this class, update via the browser flasher; settings survive.

Thanks to @Ierlandfan, @noriadzik, @sinjindog, @jimhorner67-blip, @SeAlKra136, _LM_ of forbot.pl, the ST7121 strobe hunter and the 7B night-mode reporter. This release is yours.