First solder project · fully illustratedPlane Radar Build

Written assuming you've never soldered anything in your life. Every term is explained, every move is drawn. Do it in order, tap each step as you finish, and you'll be watching live aircraft on a round screen by the end.

Soldering

▸ Ready now

Firmware

▸ Ready now

WiFi setup

▸ Ready now

Case

▸ Awaiting prints

The plan

What you're making, and the order to do it

An ESP32-C3 (a tiny WiFi computer) drives a round screen that shows real aircraft near your house, pulled live from adsb.fi. You'll connect the two boards with seven wires, load the software once from a web browser, and tell it your WiFi and location. That's the whole project.

Do it in this exact order 1. Read Soldering 101 below. 2. Practice on a spare display. 3. Load the software onto the bare ESP32 (proves it works before you commit). 4. Solder the 7 wires. 5. Power on and test. 6. Snap into the case when the prints arrive.

You have a 3-pack of displays, which is the secret weapon here: the first one is your practice piece, the second is your real build, and the third is your spare. No single mistake can sink you.

Soldering 101

Soldering, explained from zero

Soldering is gluing metal to metal with a softer metal that melts. You heat two metal parts (a wire and a pad on the board), then touch a metal wire called solder to them — it melts, flows into the gap, cools in a second or two, and now they're joined both physically and electrically. That's it. The skill is all in heat and cleanliness.

The words you'll see

Solder

The thin metal wire you melt to join things. Yours is 60/40 leaded — the easiest kind for beginners because it melts low and flows beautifully.

Flux

A cleaning paste/liquid that strips invisible oxide off the metal so solder can stick. Solder won't flow onto dirty metal. Your solder has flux inside it, and you have a flux pen for extra help.

Tinning

Pre-coating something with a thin layer of solder — the iron's tip, or a wire's bare end. Tinned metal joins instantly; bare metal fights you.

Wetting

When melted solder flows out and grabs the metal like water spreading on a clean surface, instead of balling up. Good wetting = good joint.

Joint

One finished connection — solder bonding a wire to a pad.

Fillet

The ideal joint shape: a small, shiny, concave cone — like a tiny volcano hugging the wire.

Pad / hole

The metal ring (and the hole through it) on the board where a wire goes. Your display has 7 of them in a row.

Bridge

A mistake: a blob of solder accidentally connecting two pads that shouldn't touch. Fixable.

Cold joint

A mistake: solder that didn't melt fully or got moved while cooling. Looks dull and lumpy. Just re-heat it.

Reflow

Re-heating an existing joint to fix it. The undo button of soldering.

The one golden rule Heat the parts, not the solder. Touch the iron to the wire-and-pad first, let them get hot for about a second, then feed solder into that hot spot — never melt solder on the iron tip and wipe it on. Heat-the-parts gives a strong shiny joint; wipe-it-on gives a weak blobby one.

Set up your iron (do this first, every session)

Plug the USB-C charger into your Pinecil, set it to ~330 °C / 625 °F (good for leaded solder).
When it's hot, melt a little solder right onto the tip so it goes silver and shiny — that's tinning the tip. A bright tip moves heat; a dull grey tip can't.
Wipe the tip on the dry brass wool (never a wet sponge with this tip) before and after each joint. Re-add a touch of solder if it ever looks dull.
The tip is ~330 °C and burns instantly. Park it in the holder every single time you put it down — make this a reflex now.

The map

What connects to what

Seven wires, each joining one labelled hole on the display to one pin on the ESP32. Here's the master list, then the same thing drawn out.

Display hole		ESP32-C3 pin	Wire length
VCC	→	3V3	11 mm
GND	→	GND	11 mm
RST	→	GPIO 0	11 mm
CS	→	GPIO 1	11 mm
DC	→	GPIO 10	25 mm
SDA	→	GPIO 3	11 mm
SCL	→	GPIO 4	11 mm

Each colored line is one wire. Match by the printed label — the words next to each hole are the source of truth.

The one wire you must not get wrong VCC → 3V3, never 5V. The display is a 3.3-volt part. Sending it 5V can destroy it instantly.

Where the holes are on each board

Colored pins are the ones you use. Notice six sit on the left edge and only pin 10 (DC) is on the right — that's why DC's wire is longer. Verify against the labels printed on your own board; batches vary slightly.

Label trap on your board — read this twice Your ESP32 prints G for GND, 3.3 for 3V3, and bare numbers for the GPIO pins (0 1 3 4 10). It also has its own RST pad near the USB end — that's the ESP32's own reset, and the display does NOT wire to it. The display's RST wire goes to the pad marked 0 (GPIO 0). Wiring display RST → ESP32 RST is the classic mistake on this exact board, precisely because both say "RST."

The two loose pin strips can stay in the bag Your ESP32 arrived with two header strips. This build solders wires straight into the holes, so you don't need them — set them aside. They're only for plugging into a breadboard, which this project skips.

Use your wire colors to stay sane: red for VCC, black for GND, and any other colors for the five signal wires. When something misbehaves later, color-coding turns a mystery into a 10-second trace.

Hands on

Making the 7 joints

First, prep a wire. You'll repeat this for all seven.

Prep both ends of every wire this way before it goes near the board.

Now the joint itself. This is the move you'll make 14 times (both ends of 7 wires) — three beats:

Always feed the solder into the joint, on the side opposite the iron — not onto the iron's tip.

And here's how to tell a good joint from the two common mistakes:

Aim for the green shape. The other two are normal first-timer results and both are fixable by re-heating.

The build, step by step

Tap each step to check it off as you go. Progress is for this session only.

0 / 8

Warm up on a practice display. Solder a couple of throwaway joints on a spare from your 3-pack first.
- The goal isn't a working display — it's to feel how long heat takes and what flowing solder looks like.
- Do 3–4 joints. When one comes out shiny and volcano-shaped, you're ready for the real one.
Cut your seven wires. Six at ~11 mm, one at ~25 mm (that's DC).
- Use red for VCC, black for GND, other colors for the rest.
- Keep to length — the creator sized them to fold into the case.
Strip and tin both ends of every wire (the 3-step diagram above).
- Strip ~2 mm, twist the strands, melt a tiny bit of solder into them.
- A tinned end slides into the hole and stays put instead of fraying.
each end is silver, smooth, and stiff enough to hold its shape.
Solder all 7 wires to the display first. One board, seven joints in a row — easier than juggling both.
- Clamp the display in the helping hands, label side facing you.
- Brush a little flux on a pad. Push the wire's tinned end into that hole.
- Make the joint with the 3-beat move: heat pad+wire ~1 sec, feed solder into it, pull solder, pull iron.
- Match each wire to the hole's printed label — VCC wire to the VCC hole, and so on.
each joint is a small shiny cone and the wire doesn't wiggle when nudged.
Solder the other ends to the ESP32. Now join each free wire end to its matching pin.
- Re-clamp so the ESP32 is steady and you can reach the pins.
- Work along the row so finished wires don't block the next pad.
- DC's long wire reaches across to IO10 on the far side — that's expected.
- Double-check the printed label on each ESP32 pin as you go.
Inspect under the magnifier. Look at every joint, then look between every pair of neighboring pads.
- Dull or blobby? Add a touch of flux and reheat (reflow) until it goes shiny.
- See solder touching two pads? That's a bridge — wick it off or drag the clean hot tip through it.
all 14 joints are shiny cones and no two pads are connected by stray solder.
Continuity check with a multimeter. This catches the one mistake that can kill the board.
- Set the meter to continuity (the beep mode). Touch the two probes together once to hear the beep.
- Probe each display hole and its matching ESP32 pin — it should beep (wire is connected).
- Now probe 3V3 against GND. It should NOT beep. A beep there means a short — find and fix it before powering on.
every wire beeps end-to-end, and 3V3↔GND stays silent.
Handle gently from here. Until the case arrives, the wires are the only thing holding the two boards together.
- Pick the assembly up by the boards, never by the wires.

Don't have these two yet? A multimeter (~$15) makes step 7 possible — it's the difference between catching a board-killing short and discovering it the hard way. Solder wick (~$5), a thin copper braid, lifts a bridge in seconds. Both are worth grabbing before you start.

Software · part 1

Load the firmware

"Firmware" is the program that runs on the ESP32. You load it once, from a Chrome or Edge browser on a computer — no coding. Best done before you solder, as a proof the board works.

Download the program file. Grab the latest .bin from github.com/MatixYo/ESP32-Plane-Radar/releases — under a release, look in "Assets".
Plug the ESP32 into your computer with the USB-C data cable (a charge-only cable won't work).
Put it in "download mode" so it'll accept the program:
- Unplug USB. Hold the BOOT button. Plug USB back in. Wait 2 seconds. Release BOOT.
- If that doesn't take: hold BOOT, tap RESET, release BOOT.
Open web.esphome.io in Chrome or Edge → click Connect → pick your board's serial port.
- No port appears? Redo download mode, try another data cable or USB port. The C3 usually needs no driver; a few clones want a CH340/CP210x driver.
Click Install, choose the .bin you downloaded, and let it flash.
- You do not need to "set up a new ESPHome device" — ignore that.
Done — unplug, wait a few seconds, plug back in without holding BOOT.

The proof it worked With the bare ESP32 powered (no display yet), check your phone's WiFi list for a network called PlaneRadar-Setup. If it's there, the board, cable, and software are all good — solder with total confidence.

Software · part 2

Tell it your WiFi & location

On your phone, join the PlaneRadar-Setup WiFi network.
Open http://plane-radar.local or http://192.168.4.1 in a browser.
Enter your home WiFi name + password, your latitude and longitude, and pick km or miles. Save, and wait for it to reboot.

Must be 2.4 GHz The ESP32-C3 can't see 5 GHz WiFi. Most routers broadcast both — just be sure you give it the 2.4 GHz network name.

Getting your coordinates: open Google Maps, right-click your house, and click the latitude/longitude at the top of the menu to copy it. Paste both numbers in.

First light

Power on & fix problems

Firmware loaded and all 7 wires soldered? Plug into USB. The screen should light up and draw the radar grid. If it's off, the symptom points at the cause:

What you see	What it usually means
Totally dark, no glow	Power problem. Recheck the VCC→3V3 and GND joints. Confirm 3V3, not 5V.
Lit but white / blank	A signal wire. Reflow SDA, SCL, DC, CS, RST and recheck their joints.
Scrambled / glitchy picture	Usually DC or a marginal joint. Reflow it; check for a half-bridge.
Screen works, no planes	WiFi or location. Confirm 2.4 GHz, correct lat/long, and that planes are actually overhead now.
Keeps showing setup WiFi	Credentials didn't save or wrong band. Redo WiFi setup on 2.4 GHz.

Stay safe

Four habits

Wash your hands when you're done — your solder contains lead. No food or drink at the bench.
Don't breathe the smoke. That wisp is flux fumes, an irritant. Crack a window and use a small fan to push it aside.
Holster the hot iron, every time. ~330 °C burns on contact and it stays hot after unplugging. Your silicone mat handles drips; skin doesn't.
Avoid building on carpet — touch something grounded and metal before handling the ESP32 to shed static.

Last step

When the prints arrive

Only this part needs the housing, and it's just a snap-together:

Set the screen and ESP32 into the base; press the screen in until it clicks, then seat the ESP32.
Fit the cover: press the screen side first until it clicks, then the ESP32 side.

Because you wired to the right lengths, everything folds in without slack. The electronics and software are already done — this is the victory lap.