Note: On Raspbian the SDL2 package requires X to be running. See the Raspberry Pi section for notes on running from the terminal and other improvements.
This will produce files for map and airport geometry, with labels, that viz1090 reads. If any of these files don't exist then visualizer will show planes and trails without any geography.
The default parameters for mapconverter should render resonably quickly on a Raspberri Pi 4. See the mapconverter section below for other options and more information about map sources.
The best map data source I've found so far is https://www.naturalearthdata.com. This has a lot of useful GIS data, but not airport runways, which you can get from the FAA Aeronautical Data Delivery Service (https://adds-faa.opendata.arcgis.com/)
The bash script getmap.sh will download (so long as the links don't break) and convert these. Alternatiely, you can pass shapefiles and other arguments to mapconverter.py directly
### MAPCONVERTER.PY RUNTIME OPTIONS
| Argument | Description |
| ----------------------------- | ----------- |
| --mapfile | shapefile for main map |
| --mapnames | shapefile for map place names |
| --airportfile | shapefile for airport runway outlines |
| --airportnames | shapefile for airport IATA names |
| --minpop | minimum population to show place names for (defaults to 100000) |
| --tolerance" | map simplification tolerance (defaults to 0.001, which works well on a Raspberry Pi 4 - smaller values will produce more detail but slow down the map refresh rate) |
* [Pimoroni HyperPixel 4.0 Display](https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4) \*best overall, but requires some rework to use battery monitoring features of the PiJuice mentioned below
* [Waveshare 5.5" AMOLED](https://www.waveshare.com/5.5inch-hdmi-amoled.htm) \*this is very good screen but the Google Pixel 2 phone mentioned below has a very similar display for the same price (along with everything else you need in a nice package)
* [PiJuice Battery Hat](https://uk.pi-supply.com/products/pijuice-standard) \*I2C pins must be reworked to connect to the Hyperpixel nonstandard I2C breakout pins, unfortunately
If running as a front end only, with a separate dump1090 server, the best option is to use an Android phone, such as the Pixel 2, which significantly outperforms a Raspberry Pi 4.
viz1090 has been tested on other boards such as the UP Core and UP Squared, but these boards have poor performance compared to a Raspberry Pi 4, along with worse software and peripheral support, so they are not recommended. viz1090 with a low resolution map will run on these boards or even a Raspberry Pi Zero, so these remain options with some tradeoffs.