skyBlip Go has one button worth learning, and it says three things: a press changes page, two quick presses authorise what the device is asking about, and a hold of two seconds switches it off. Nothing else is hidden behind it, and the three never overlap — a hold is never read as a press, and a press made before a question appeared can never answer it.
The case carries two more inputs: a small RST button, which is the processor’s reset and the way into the USB bootloader, and a capacitive touch pad, which the firmware reads for one thing only: putting the device away for a season with a blank screen. Both are covered at the foot of this page.
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| One press | next page — or, at a question on the glass, refuses it |
| Two presses, under 0.6 s apart | allows the question on the glass; on the settings page, changes the focused row |
| Hold, 2 s | switches the device off |
| The same hold, finger on the pad | switches it off and leaves the screen blank, for storage |
The device below is the firmware a skyBlip Go runs, compiled to WebAssembly: the same radar, the same pages, the same debounced button. Press the key on the edge to change page, press it twice quickly, or hold it for two seconds and watch the device switch itself off and keep the wordmark on the glass.
Switching on is one press. Switching off is a hold of two seconds: the radio is parked, the panel is given three seconds to finish drawing the wordmark, and the rails drop only once your thumb is off the button. E-paper keeps its last image with no power at all, so the wordmark is what the device wears while it is off — that image on the glass means off, not asleep.
Putting it away for the season is the same hold with a finger on the touch pad from the start: the same road out, and the glass is left blank instead of wearing the wordmark. An e-paper keeps whatever it was last given for as long as it is off, and one image left there for months leaves a shadow the panel never fully loses. A device going into a cupboard until the spring should be carrying nothing.
Two cases are deliberately not what a phone does. A charger plugged into a device that is off leaves it off and charging, because a cable found in a flight bag is not a request to start transmitting; hold the button while you plug in if you want the device as well. And a device that switched itself off on a flat cell will not come back on a press: it waits for a charger, so a button pressed by the weight of a bag cannot finish the battery off.
| From off | What happens |
|---|---|
| Press the button | boots, unless the cell is under 3.4 V with no charger |
| Plug the charger in | charges, stays off |
| Hold the button, plug the charger in | boots and charges |
| Press after a flat-battery shutdown | nothing, by design — plug the charger in |
| Press RST | boots |
In flight the button is a page selector: radar, six-pack, status, signal, radio log, then the settings page, then round again. The PAGES row in the settings hides the ones you do not fly with — all of them, radar and status only, or radar alone — and a hidden page is skipped by the button rather than cycled through. The settings page is always in the cycle, so the way back in is never something you can hide from yourself.
Everything that matters can be set on the device, with no phone: press to walk down the rows, press twice to act on the one highlighted. Keep tapping inside the window and the value keeps stepping, which is how you wind the subscale to where you want it. Nothing is a draft: each act is one finished change, so there is no way to leave the device half edited.
The rows only ever advance, the last one hands the glass back to the traffic picture, and a settings page nobody has pressed for a minute returns there on its own. You cannot get stuck in here.
| Row | Two presses |
|---|---|
| ID | nothing — your ADS-L address, shown, never changed by a thumb |
| AIRCRAFT | next type: glider, microlight, helicopter, paraglider, balloon, and the rest of the ADS-L list |
| ALARM | on or off |
| VOLUME | 0 to 5 |
| UNITS | metric, or feet and knots |
| QNH UP / QNH DOWN | one hectopascal per press, 940 to 1050 |
| PAGES | all, radar and status, radar only |
| BACK TO TRAFFIC | leaves the settings |
When the companion app asks for something that could change the aircraft you are flying — new firmware, a settings blob, erasing your flights, switching the device off — the device does not act on the phone’s word. It puts the question on its own glass, names it, and waits thirty seconds: PRESS TWICE TO ALLOW, ONE PRESS REFUSES. No answer inside the window is a refusal too.
Presses only count once the question has actually reached the glass and your thumb has stopped, so a run of presses that was cycling pages cannot be spent on an authorisation. Physical presence is the whole of the security here: the device asks nobody to pair, and it asks you to be holding it.
RST is a hardware reset: press it and the device reboots, whatever the firmware was doing. Two presses inside half a second put it into the USB bootloader instead, where it appears as a drive you can drop a firmware file onto. That route belongs to the bootloader rather than to our firmware, which is what makes it the way back from a device that will not start.
The touch pad is read in one place and nowhere else: held through the two-second press that switches the device off, it blanks the screen for storage. On its own it does nothing at all. It cannot switch the device on or off, it cannot change a page, and it cannot answer a question on the glass.
That is deliberate, and it is the same reasoning that kept the pad unread for so long: a capacitive pad is unusable through winter gloves, it fires on a cheek and on rain, and one button whose three gestures you can practise on the ground beats two inputs whose vocabulary you have to remember in the air. None of that reaches a gesture you make once a season, on the ground, with both hands on the device. The worst a pad wet with rain can do is send a device off with a blank screen instead of a wordmark.