radar-simulator

Museum exhibit software simulating 1940s–1960s vintage radar systems.

Project overview

This application runs as a full-screen interactive exhibit on a Geekom A8 Max (AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, Radeon 780M GPU, Ubuntu 25.10). Visitors can explore four historical radar types by cycling through a selection screen and interacting with keyboard controls.

Four radar displays:

#	Name	Type	Location
1	Chain Home	A-scope (WWII, 1940s)	RAF Ventnor, Isle of Wight
2	Marine A-Scope	A-scope (pre-PPI, manually steered dish)	Community Boating Center, Bellingham Bay WA
3	Marine Traffic Control	PPI scope	Center of Bellingham Bay WA
4	Police Boat	PPI scope (moving platform)	Taylor Dock / Boulevard Park, Bellingham Bay WA

Tech stack

Language: C++20
Graphics: OpenGL 4.3 Core, GLFW, GLAD
Text: FreeType 2
Maps/LIDAR: GDAL (libgdal-dev)
Database: PostgreSQL (database: radar, user: radar)
Build: CMake

Build

mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

The executable is build/radar_simulator.

Running

# All four radars available
./radar_simulator

# Specific radars only
./radar_simulator chain_home marine_ascope
./radar_simulator marine_traffic police_boat

If only one radar is specified, it auto-activates after 5 seconds.

Screen layout

The window is 1920×1080 and is divided into three areas:

Left text panel (upper-left, 500 px wide): radar description and keyboard controls
Status bar (lower-left, 500×250 px): current control values in yellow
Scope (right side, square, full height): radar display

Keyboard controls

Key	Action
1	Step forward in radar selection (or return to selection when operating)
2	Step backward in radar selection
ENTER	Activate selected radar
ESC	Exit
3 / 4	Intensity lower / higher
5 / 6	Receiver sensitivity lower / higher
Q / W	STC sensitivity lower / higher
E / R	STC range lower / higher
T / Y	Rain noise filter lower / higher (PPI scopes only)
U / I	Radiogoniometer left / right (Chain Home only)
O / P	Max range step down / up (all except Chain Home)
A / S	Range cursor lower / higher (PPI scopes only)
D / F	Bearing cursor CCW / CW (PPI scopes only)
G / H	Antenna rotation CCW / CW (Marine A-Scope only)

Component .md files

Each component has a specification and status file:

01_classes.md — class hierarchy (RadarBase + 4 subclasses; stubs built)
02_text_description.md — text renderer and left-panel text content (complete)
03_setup_and_radar_selection.md — startup, selection loop, main render loop (complete)

Current build state

The initialization and radar-management infrastructure is complete:

Four stub radar subclasses render description text, keyboard control lists, and current control values in the status bar.
The scope area shows the radar name with a [stub] label — no actual radar simulation is drawn yet.
All keyboard controls update CPU globals; uniforms will be pushed to shaders as each scope component is built.

Real radar scope rendering (sweep, targets, graticule, range rings/ticks, terrain, P7 phosphor persistence) will be added one radar at a time.

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