Hi, I’m Jason, and PlankLabs is my workshop in Olive Branch, Mississippi. It started the way these things usually do: an ESP32 dev board, a spare touchscreen, and the question “could this little thing tell me when the Space Station is overhead?” It could. Then the weather radar wanted a screen. Then the planes. Then the tides. Then the ping times.
Now I design, assemble, and test every gadget by hand: the circuit goes into a 3D-printed enclosure printed a few feet from my desk, the firmware I wrote gets flashed and validated, and each unit runs on the bench watching real data before it ships. If it wouldn’t earn a spot on my own desk, it doesn’t go in the box.
Every gadget uses the same board, and the tour is in The Board Inside Every PlankLabs Gadget.
The rules of the lab
Real sources, honestly labeled. The gadgets pull from the National Weather Service, NOAA sensors, the U.S. Geological Survey, daily-refreshed orbital data, live ADS-B flight data, and independent sports data providers. Each gadget’s page names its source. They’re for delight and general awareness, not for navigation or safety-critical decisions.
Pay once. What you pay on Etsy is the whole cost. Setup runs in your phone’s browser, and gadgets update themselves over the air with fixes and new features.
The honest fine print. Live-data devices depend on third-party sources I don’t control. I commit to every reasonable effort to keep your device working (that’s what the OTA pipeline is for), but I can’t guarantee an outside data feed exists forever. The hardware is always yours, and I’ll never stop doing my best to keep the data flowing.
Have an idea, a question, or a request for a gadget that doesn’t exist yet? Message me through Etsy. I actually answer.