The "Our Backyard" Screen Tracker Keeps an Eye on the ISS and Planets Surrounding You
Custom PCB plays host to a compact sub-2" display and an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 microcontroller.
Pseudonymous maker "mars91" has built a compact gadget to let you track the location of their namesake, other planets, or the International Space Station (ISS) on a 1.9" IPS TFT display: the Screen Tracker.
"This simple screen shows the locations of the planets and the ISS (International Space Station) in real time," mars91 explains of their creation. "It displays their latitude and longitude or, if a straight line were made from Earth to the object, where on Earth's crust the line would pop out."
The heart of the project is a custom printed circuit board (PCB) dubbed "Our Backyard," which hosts the other components: a 1.9" 320×170 color IPS TFT panel based on the ST7789 controller chip, driven by an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 development board. There are two push-button switches, a slide switch for power, and a single Adafruit Neopixel RGB LED.
The Espressif ESP32-S2 connects to the user's Wi-Fi network to communicate with mars91's "orbital API" application programming interface — which provides the ISS's state vector and latitude-longitude positions of each of the planets, based on where they'd hit if they fell to Earth and also weren't so massive that the answer would be "literally everywhere."
"The code will hit the API every 30 minutes to refresh the ISS and planet data," mars91 explains. "It will also move the ISS on the screen using astrophysics and the chip's internal clock! One button switches the display to the ISS, while the other button switches to the planets. If on planet 'mode,' it will keep cycling thru them every 30 seconds. That's it!"
The project's source code and assembly instructions are provided on Instructables, while the PCB design has been uploaded to PCBWay under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The maker had not, at the time of writing, published source code for the API — but writes that "if for some reason it goes down, I can always set up a quick GitHub repo so you can build the site locally, just ask."