Updates & field notes

Firmware 1.6.0 turns first-time setup into a two-minute phone job. A new display opens its own FTLED-XXXX Wi-Fi network; join it and a FlightTrackerLED setup page opens by itself, lists the networks around you, and joins your Wi-Fi live while you watch the panel confirm it.

• Phone-first setup — pick your network, type the password, done. No USB-C cable and no computer required.
• Link code on the panel — once the display is online it shows a short code. Enter it at settings.flighttrackerled.com with your email and the display is yours.
• USB still works — the guided USB flow in Chrome or Edge is unchanged and the panel still shows it as the alternative.
• Rescue hotspot — if your saved Wi-Fi stops working after a new router or password, the display reopens its hotspot so you can fix it from your phone while it keeps retrying on its own.
• Restart loop after setup, fixed before it shipped — testing the hotspot flow on our own display caught a bug in the first two builds (1.6.0 and 1.6.1): after a hotspot setup the display could restart every few seconds the moment it reached the cloud. 1.6.2 removes the cause (a thread-safety fault in a network library call) and never reached a customer display.

The signed 1.6.4 build has passed its canary display, including a full phone hotspot setup end to end and an over-the-air update; online Mach 2 displays receive it over the air next, and new displays ship with it. (1.6.4 also makes updates themselves more robust: the display sets aside its cloud connection for the few minutes a download takes, so the update never has to fight it for memory.)

Nearby aircraft from your own receiver still appear immediately. If the route arrives a moment later, the origin and destination now fill into the row already on screen instead of waiting for the next display page.

• No page-boundary hold — temporary question marks are replaced as soon as the exact route reaches the display.
• Aircraft stay visible — route lookup never hides or delays a nearby plane.
• Automatic operation — there is no new mode or setting; route details continue to update in the background.
• Sub-second live results — the first two canary measurements applied resolved routes at the box in 955 ms and 659 ms.

The signed Wi-Fi rollout is progressing through online, in-service Mach 2 displays with a full health check on every box.

Firmware 1.5.10 and its cloud update shortened the route path for newly heard Local ADS-B aircraft while keeping every plane visible from the moment your receiver reports it.

• One area lookup, many ready routes — the service prepares a bounded set of nearby route details and reuses them as aircraft enter the display.
• Exact-aircraft fast path — a new plane can be resolved immediately without waiting for another full area refresh.
• Lightweight delivery — the display receives only the small route overlays it needs, never the larger provider response.

Version 1.5.11 completes this work by removing the final display-page wait after a route has arrived.

Firmware 1.5.9 is a reliability release shaped by live testing on real displays. It is now confirmed across every online, in-service Mach 2.

• Fairer aircraft rotation — multiple planes keep their proper order, so two flights no longer bounce back and forth while another is left waiting.
• Lone planes return correctly — a temporarily hidden aircraft can reappear, and changing the timeout now takes effect immediately instead of waiting for a reboot.
• Smoother brightness changes — rapid slider adjustments no longer interrupt scrolling with repeated storage writes.
• More operating headroom — the display and messaging paths use substantially less working memory, improving stability during busy skies and firmware updates.
• Better support visibility — the display can securely report what scene it is actually rendering, while preserving Local ADS-B privacy controls.

The update is delivered over Wi-Fi with no settings changes required. Displays that are currently offline remain on their existing firmware until they reconnect.

Local ADS-B is live in firmware 1.5.4. If you run an ADS-B receiver at home (a Raspberry Pi with PiAware, dump1090, tar1090 or readsb — the usual setups), your tracker now folds that feed straight into the overhead scanner.

• Your own antenna, second by second — position, altitude, speed and heading come off your receiver as it hears them, while route and airline details keep arriving from the cloud. Both halves at once.
• Planes only your roof hears — light general-aviation traffic and low flyers a wide network misses. If your antenna caught it, your board can show it.
• Fully API-provider independent — with a receiver attached, overhead positions come off your antenna, not a third-party API. Provider outages and rate limits stop applying to your overhead traffic.
• Optional, and off unless you turn it on — two steps in the owner portal: flip the switch, paste your receiver's address, and a health card confirms it's receiving.
• What your antenna hears stays yours — the tracker talks to your receiver directly over your own network, and nothing it hears gets uploaded. Only a small health summary goes up.

And for people starting from zero: the new ADS-B Kit is a complete FlightTracker LED with its own plug-and-play receiver — the whole experience out of one box, built in partnership with the airplanes.live community network. From $399; reservations are open.

A cloud release — live on every box already, no update needed. Same sharp customer, same great catches (the video sealed it).

• Overhead scanner stays on screen — the Aug 1 eviction fix could briefly mistake a data-provider blip for an empty sky and drop your display to the clock for one cycle. The cloud now rides through blips; genuinely departed planes still clear fast.
• Tracking an already-airborne flight now picks up FlightAware details — first lookups that failed used to wait five minutes to retry; they now retry within a minute. Tail-number tracking no longer spends FlightAware calls that could never match — live tracking there is free.
• Honest status messages that fit the panel — "Flight not" was a longer message cut off at the panel edge. Statuses now fit, and a brief coverage gap keeps the last good page up with "No signal" instead of dropping it.
• The airline filter is now clearable — leave it blank in the portal to show every airline at your airport. Firmware 1.4.20 is rolling out too — first boxes have it now, the rest follow the usual staged rollout — and it hides the per-row airline column when you filter to one airline (it was redundant there).

A cloud release — live on every box already, no update needed. Once again driven by a sharp customer report (you know who you are — the full-name clue cracked it).

• Overhead scanner: departed planes clear in seconds — an aircraft leaving your coverage area could previously linger on screen for a minute or three with frozen data, and would swap its type code for the full aircraft name while it did. Both were the same stale-data path underneath; it's fixed at the root.
• Aircraft label setting now sticks everywhere — if you picked type codes, you get type codes, no matter which data path served the flight.
• Departure board refreshes are now nearly free — how often your board redraws and how often we call FlightAware on your key are no longer the same number. Keep a fast refresh; your key's usage drops to a fraction.
• Firmware 1.4.19 is rolling out — first boxes have it now, the rest of the fleet follows the usual staged rollout. Headline fix: the departure board loads within seconds of switching to it instead of waiting out your refresh interval.

A cloud release — no firmware update needed, every box has it already. This one closes out the biggest tracked-flight complaints in one pass, with thanks to the customer whose detailed bug report drove it.

• Tracking no longer freezes — a tracked flight's status, progress bar, and live altitude/speed/position now refresh continuously through every phase (scheduled → taxi → en route → descent → landed) instead of stalling after the first lookup.
• Landed, then back to the scanner — a landed flight actually shows LANDED, and the display returns to the overhead scanner about 20 minutes after arrival.
• Any flight-number form — B6 1234 or JBU1234, either resolves now.
• No key needed once airborne — free tracking picks the flight up in the air; linking your own free FlightAware key adds pre-departure status and the departure board.
• Queued flights — enter tomorrow's flight today and choose “when the flight activates”: your board stays on the overhead scanner until the flight actually starts, then switches over by itself.
• Night mode on a schedule — set on/off times (your box's local time) and it dims automatically; night brightness now goes down to 6%.
• Departure boards no longer drop late flights — they hold at the top as DELAY until there's real departure evidence.
• Atlantic / Puerto Rico timezone added; the retired rainfall toggle is gone from settings.

Four releases of under-the-hood engineering (v1.4.15 → v1.4.18), delivered as one automatic update. Nothing changes about how you use your tracker — this one is about trust and toughness: every update is now verified end-to-end, and the box double-checks itself before accepting new firmware.

• Signed updates — every firmware file now carries a cryptographic signature your tracker verifies on-device, plus an exact size and checksum match. It only ever runs firmware that genuinely came from us.
• Self-checking installs — after updating, the tracker watches its own health for several minutes and quietly returns to the previous version if anything looks off. Updates land clean or not at all.
• A calmer update screen — during an update the panel reads “UPDATING — DO NOT UNPLUG” for about 10 minutes while everything verifies. That’s normal: leave it plugged in and it comes back on its own.
• Sturdier first-time setup — clearer on-screen steps while a new box comes online, with smarter retries if the cloud is briefly unreachable during setup.

Every box that’s been online since mid-July already has it. Been unplugged for a while? Just power up — your tracker catches up automatically.

The biggest personalization drop yet: every part of the display now has its own color, picked live from your settings page — plus a one-tap night mode for after dark, and clearer messages during setup.

• Custom colors — clocks, callsigns, routes, the detail ticker: each part of the display gets its own color picker in your settings page.
• Live preview — park the board on a preview scene while you choose; every pick shows on the panel the moment you click it.
• Night mode — one tap swaps the whole board to a dim, warm palette that won’t light up the room; daytime brings your colors right back.
• Fix: picking colors quickly no longer causes a brief flicker — changes land instantly and save quietly in the background.
• Clearer setup — if a Wi-Fi password is mistyped or the box can’t reach the cloud during setup, the panel now says exactly that instead of leaving you guessing.

Rolling out over OTA now — most boxes already have it, and the rest will pick it up automatically.

Two upgrades: your board now recognizes far more international airports, and you get new control over how the panel behaves when several planes — or just one — are overhead.

• International airports — flights to and from 8,000+ airports worldwide now show the correct airport code, so international routes read right instead of coming up blank.
• Cleaner multi-plane rotation — each plane holds for exactly the display time you set, then rotates to the next; no more lingering past your setting.
• “When only one plane is overhead” — a new setting: keep a lone plane until it leaves your area (the default), or show it for a set time — 8 seconds up to 2 minutes — then return to your clock.

Shipped over OTA — boxes picked it up automatically.

A round of polish for tracking a specific flight, plus a friendlier time-zone picker — shipped over OTA.

• Delayed flights now show the updated arrival time, not the original schedule.
• The time-remaining countdown now shows the live time to landing while you track a flight.
• “Flying over” names more cities on long-haul routes.
• A clearer time-zone picker in your settings — choose your zone by name, with daylight saving handled automatically.

Shipped over OTA — boxes picked it up automatically.

The largest update since launch — a new firmware line (the version jump from v1.07 is real) plus a cloud platform upgrade, delivered to every box over OTA in one night. Your display is already running it.

• A new route engine, built in-house — where each plane is coming from and going to now comes from a far richer aviation data layer we've spent months building, with our previous source as automatic backup. In testing it matched FlightAware's answer on every single high-confidence route.
• Switch apps from anywhere — change between Overhead, Flight Tracker, Departures, and Snow from the settings page, live, no reboot.
• Flight display time & scroll speed — planes no longer switch away mid-scroll; you choose how long each one holds and how fast details move.
• Overhead flight filters — altitude, speed, and direction-of-travel filters (with a compass picker), so the panel shows exactly the traffic you care about.
• Link your own FlightAware key — stored securely per box; it powers the Departure Board and follows a tracked flight from pushback to landing (airborne tracking works without one).
• A smarter plane-stats page — emergency-squawk watch, record speed/altitude/closest pass, busiest hour, top airlines and routes.
• Settings that fix themselves — off-shape coverage areas and half-filled forms are quietly auto-repaired instead of throwing errors at you.

Want to feel it without owning a box yet? We built a live settings demo →

Two of the most-requested ideas from the Hangar, on the active list.

• Most-tracked search — search for and pull up whichever aircraft the tracking community is watching most right now.
• Live mode — real-time flight stats that refresh at very high frequency for a truly live readout. It's intensive, so it runs in 2-minute bursts at a time.

In active development now — it'll arrive over OTA when it's ready, like every release.

The step teased in v1.06 shipped: tracking a specific flight without your own FlightAware key. You entered a flight number and, once the aircraft was in the air, the box followed it live from our own backend — included free with every Mach 2.

• No FlightAware key needed — free individual-flight lookups through our backend API. Pre-departure schedule and status still came from your own linked key.
• Picked up once airborne — tracking locked on once the plane was in the air, rather than gate-to-gate.
• Live in-flight data — position, altitude, and speed updated as the flight moved.

Shipped over OTA — boxes picked it up automatically.

This is a reliability firmware release, not a flashy scene release. The goal is to make the existing tracking path steadier before the next bigger backend step lands.

What changed:

• More tolerant API path - the box handles provider hiccups, stale responses, and partial flight data more gracefully.
• Stronger flight lookup - callsigns that change shape, delayed route data, and upstream disagreements are less likely to knock tracking off course.
• Steadier individual flight tracking - tracked flights should get stuck less often and recover better when a provider sends old or incomplete data.

The free individual flight tracker backend is the next bigger step and is coming in v1.07. v1.06 is the cleanup release that makes that path more dependable.

Mostly under-the-hood work this week. v1.05 isn't about new visible features — it's the foundation that makes the next few releases possible. You'll feel it as faster data, fresher routes, and fewer ghost disconnects.

What changed:

• Faster overhead data — the Overhead Scanner now updates in near-real-time instead of waiting on a fixed refresh interval.
• Redundant data path — a secondary feed is wired up alongside Airplanes.live so the box keeps tracking if the primary has a hiccup, with smarter handling when sources disagree.
• Cleaner tracked-flight rendering — leaner data on the wire frees up cycles for the matrix.
• Smarter route lookups — the box self-corrects when a flight's route info goes stale.
• Fresher route cache — flight numbers and route metadata update more often.
• Tighter network hygiene — fewer false disconnects, faster pickup of new patches.
• More resilient first-boot — the handoff from the production flasher is sturdier.

What this isn't: v1.05 doesn't add new user-visible scenes. The bigger feature work (live mode for tracked planes, night mode, alerts, specific plane alerts, most-tracked view) is in active development — see the Roadmap cards below — and is targeted for v1.07+.

v1.05 has shipped through OTA. If your box has not picked it up yet, use Settings → Firmware → Check for update.

Patch for the issue a few of you reported in the Hangar — Departure Board would briefly blank for ~10 seconds when the upstream feed returned an empty response. The renderer now treats empty responses as "hold last frame" instead of clearing the matrix.

• Fix: empty schedule responses no longer clear the display
• Fix: small wrap issue on long flight callsigns
• Improvement: lower memory footprint in Departure Board scene

OTA goes out tonight — your box will pick it up automatically.

If you already own an original FlightTrackerLED box, the Drop-In is the upgrade path: keep your maple enclosure, swap the brain. You ship me back the old controller, I ship you a new Mach 2 board pre-flashed with the latest firmware, and you pop it into the same frame.

How the swap works, briefly:

• Order the Drop-In from the store (verification at checkout — original-owner only).
• I email a prepaid return label for your old controller.
• Your new Mach 2 board ships within ~3 business days, pre-paired with your account so it boots straight into setup.
• Open the back panel, unscrew two M3s, lift out the old board, drop in the new one, reconnect the matrix ribbon. ~5 minutes.
• Run through the browser setup wizard once to finish onboarding; firmware updates are handled automatically from there.

No new enclosure, no new sale price — just the parts that needed updating.

Big update. The Overhead Scanner now smooths motion between data updates, which makes traffic feel like it's actually moving across the sky rather than teleporting.

• Smoother motion between updates
• New altitude-band color ramp (configurable)
• Filter by aircraft type from the dashboard (jet / prop / heli)
• Fixed: rare crash on certain callsigns

Goal: follow individual aircraft. Add tail numbers (N12345) or callsigns (UAL2293) to a per-box watchlist. The matrix flashes a small marker and — if you've got Alerts on — pings your phone when a watched aircraft enters your overhead window.

Tail number vs callsign:

• Tail number reliably identifies a specific aircraft across days, routes, and pilots. Use this if you want to catch one particular plane.
• Callsign identifies a scheduled flight on a given day. Use this if you want any flight on the route, regardless of which physical aircraft happens to be assigned.

Real-world uses already coming up in the Hangar: catching a partner's inbound, watching a vintage warbird based at the local field, or just following a route that's been a quiet curiosity for years. Watchlist will be per-device at launch; multi-box sync is on the longer list.

Goal: get a notification when something interesting happens overhead, without having to babysit the matrix.

What you'll be able to subscribe to:

• Emergency squawks (the standard aviation distress codes)
• Military traffic
• Watchlist hits — your own tail numbers and callsigns (see the next card)
• Rare-bird flags — vintage props, custom-tagged jets, and other oddities worth looking up for

Channels (planned): web push, email, and an on-matrix flash. All independently togglable per category. Default state will be off — alerts only fire when you've explicitly opted in to a category.

Configuration will live at Settings → Alerts.

Goal: a brightness curve that follows local sunrise and sunset, plus an optional "quiet hours" window where the matrix sleeps regardless of light level. Set it once, the box manages itself.

What you'll see: brightness eases through twilight into the dark hours and back up to dawn — no hard cutoffs, no jarring transitions.

Quiet hours: optional override (e.g. 22:00 → 07:00) where the matrix dims to off regardless of where the sun is. Useful if your box lives in a bedroom or you just don't want a glow at 3am.

Thanks to everyone in the Hangar weighing in on the curve shape — leaning toward the soft easing over linear and stepped variants. Configuration target: Settings → Display → Night mode.

Small one. Some routers were taking long enough to come back up after a power blip that the box would give up reconnecting. It's now more patient — backs off and keeps retrying through extended outages.

Goal: keep what's on your matrix matched to what's actually overhead in near real-time, instead of refreshing every minute or so.

Rollout strategy: rather than gating Live mode behind an opt-in toggle, the plan is to ship it on by default for every Mach 2 — no fallback, no toggle, no settings hunt.

What you'll notice when it ships: overhead traffic will feel alive. Aircraft that currently "pop" between snapshots will glide. Departure Board will update the moment a flight pushes back, not on the next refresh tick.

Status: the v1.05 infrastructure release laid the foundation this depends on. v1.06 strengthened the API and lookup path, and the next backend step is targeted for v1.07.

Cleaned up the policy page with plain-language order processing times, return windows, and what to do if your box arrives damaged. Nothing changed materially — just easier to read.

Subtle but nice — Departure Board now tints the flight number with a per-airline accent, so a row of UAL flights looks visually distinct from a row of DAL flights at a glance. Configurable from the dashboard if you want to override.

Right now Departure Board pins to one airport. The plan is to let you cycle through up to 3 airports on a configurable rotation — useful if you live between two hubs or want to keep tabs on a destination.

Status: scoped, designed, not started. Coming after the v1.05 and v1.06 reliability work — most likely v1.07 or later.

The foundation. v1.00 is the firmware that powered the very first Mach 2 boxes off the bench — every box now ships with the latest firmware and OTA-updates from there, but this is where the line started.

Scenes shipped at launch:

• Overhead Scanner — live aircraft data from Airplanes.live, rendered to your local sky window
• Departure Board — flight number, gate, and status feed for one configurable airport
• Individual Flight Tracker — pin a specific flight and follow it across legs and days

Setup: browser-based wizard at setup.flighttrackerled.com. No app, no account required. Up and running in just a few minutes.

Connectivity: Wi-Fi with auto-reconnect after router reboots. OTA update channel established for everything that comes after.

Controls: brightness, scene rotation, and per-scene config from the on-device dashboard.

v1.00 is the version that started it all. Everything in the log above is built on top of this.