Turn your Picade into a live flight radar (when you're not playing)

Picade
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My Picade Max spends most of its time switched off, so I gave it a second job: a live flight radar showing the aircraft overhead.

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It runs FlightScnr Pi, a great project by Yash Mulgaonkar originally built for a round 4in touch display: GitHub - yashmulgaonkar/FlightScnr_Pi: Desktop flight and marine radar: a real-time aircraft and marine vessel tracker powered by a Raspberry Pi and 4" round screen. · GitHub

I had ordered the round panel, but I couldn’t wait to try it — so I adapted it to the cabinet instead. Three things had to change:

  • **The screen.** The layout is built for a square touch panel, so element sizes grew with the resolution and the radar looked enormous on a 1280x1024 monitor. There is now a scale setting that keeps the chrome compact and leaves the extra pixels to the map. Any panel on a Pi works, not just mine.
  • **No touchscreen.** A small daemon turns the joystick into a virtual mouse through /dev/uinput, so you aim with the stick and click with a button.
  • **No swipe gestures.** The panel buttons stand in for them: L1/R1 move between screens, B returns to the radar, L2/R2 change the range.

Everything is optional and unset by default, so this doesn’t disturb a normal touchscreen install.

The cabinet still plays games: Recalbox stays untouched on the NVMe, Raspberry Pi OS with FlightScnr lives on a separate USB SSD, and the cabinet power button picks between them at boot via a conditional BOOT_ORDER in the bootloader EEPROM. Interestingly the Pi 5 bootloader does evaluate [gpio17=0] filters, which isn’t documented for the 2712.

You don’t need an ADS-B receiver: the app can use the free adsb.fi cloud feed with no key and no dongle. If you already feed FlightRadar24 or FlightAware, it reads your local dump1090 instead, which is what I do.

Code, wiring notes, control mapping, dual-boot setup and the traps hit https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr_Pi/blob/community/picade/docs/picade.md

Branch: https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr_Pi/tree/community/picade

Read doc

Yash has kindly created a community/picade branch on the main repo, so it will live there once merged. All the credit for the project itself goes to him — I only taught it to talk to an arcade stick.

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