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

**URL:** https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/turn-your-picade-into-a-live-flight-radar-when-youre-not-playing/29032
**Category:** Picade
**Created:** [August 4, 2026, 11:03pm UTC](https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/turn-your-picade-into-a-live-flight-radar-when-youre-not-playing/29032 "2026-08-04T23:03:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Charly86](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forums.pimoroni.com/charly86/32/12261_2.png) [@Charly86](https://forums.pimoroni.com/u/Charly86)
#### Post date: [August 4, 2026, 11:03pm UTC](https://forums.pimoroni.com/t/turn-your-picade-into-a-live-flight-radar-when-youre-not-playing/29032/1 "2026-08-04T23:03:05Z")

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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.

 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/pimoroni/original/2X/0/0762fd0db3600f2de56dcf30d541908744c1da7d.jpeg)

 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/pimoroni/original/2X/e/e561ee0c4ad358ddca2d29fbf78a986570e86da5.jpeg)

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](https://github.com/yashmulgaonkar/FlightScnr_Pi)

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](http://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](https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr_Pi/blob/community/picade/docs/picade.md)

Branch: [https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr\_Pi/tree/community/picade](https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr_Pi/tree/community/picade)

Read [doc](https://github.com/hallard/FlightScnr_Pi/blob/community/picade/docs/picade.md)

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.