METAR Deck

METAR Deck brings real-world aviation weather to your Elgato Stream Deck.

Pin ICAOs to keys, cycle them on the dial, and see flight category — VFR green, MVFR blue, IFR red, LIFR purple — at a glance. Built for flight simmers, home cockpits, and pilots.

Who it's for

Flight simmers running live-weather MSFS, X-Plane, P3D, or DCS. Home cockpit builders who already use Stream Deck for switchology. Pilots and student pilots keeping eyes on home, destination, and alternates.

Two actions, one product

METAR Station — any Stream Deck. Pin 1–10 ICAOs to a key; press to cycle, long-press for the detail page. Live METAR on a flight-category-colored background.

METAR Cycler — Stream Deck + only. Up to 10 ICAOs per encoder. Rotate to scroll; the touchscreen shows a hero summary plus a chip strip of your stations in their own colors. Press or hold for an auto-scrolling detail view.

What's inside

Category change cue — when a flight category changes, an edge stripe shows the color it just left for an hour, fading toward the direction of change. One glance: getting better or worse?

FAA-standard flight category palette — VFR / MVFR / IFR / LIFR, the same colors real pilots read every day.

Color-blind safe palette option — per-action toggle for a CVD-safe alternative (Wong/Okabe-Ito anchored, well past WCAG AA on white text), distinguishable for red-green color blindness. Rare in Stream Deck plugins; standard for us. Covers the change cue too.

Custom station labels — rename any airport on the button face. KSEA=Seahawk, one per line.

Colored condition icons — yellow sun, blue rain, cyan lightning, pale-blue snow, gray fog, campfire smoke.

Wind ≥ 15 kt cue — phosphor-green chevron when sustained wind hits 15 kt or any gust is reported.

Configurable bottom row — per action: T/Td, altimeter (inHg or hPa), temp, dewpoint, sea-level pressure, or decoded phenomena like +TSRA BR.

Visibility in miles or meters — per-action unit toggle for international users.

Smart hourly refresh — anchors on each station's report time (~1 API call per hour), or a fixed 15–60 min interval to catch SPECIs faster.

Refresh on demand — set a key press (or the Cycler's dial press) to fetch fresh METARs immediately. One last check before pushback.

Zero telemetry. No server receives plugin data. Settings stay on your device.

Detail page — your choice

Long-press a key or hold the Cycler touchscreen for a full-page METAR view. Defaults to our purpose-built lookup at traconlabs.com/metar/. Prefer metar-taf.com? One click. Or any custom URL, or off entirely.

Compatibility

Stream Deck app 7.1 or higher; internet connection required

METAR Cycler requires a Stream Deck + (dial + touchscreen); METAR Station works on every model

Limitations

Smaller US airports without ASOS/AWOS don't issue METARs. Use the nearest reporting K-airport.

What's next

v1.3 added the smoke icon, change cue, refresh on demand, and metric visibility. Roadmap: TAFs, SIGMETs, nearest-station fallback. Free updates within v1.x.

Data source

METARs come straight from the U.S. Aviation Weather Center — the same NOAA source ForeFlight and SkyVector use.

Support

Hello@traconlabs.com — replies from a real human, usually within a day.

# METAR Deck — v1.3 Release Notes

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Built for fire season

Smoke finally looks like smoke. When a METAR reports FU or HZ, the key now shows a campfire — flame, logs, and smoke drifting downwind — instead of a generic fog or partly-cloudy icon. Haze shares the icon on purpose: automated stations can't tell smoke from haze, so during fire season a hazy AUTO report often is smoke.

See which way the weather is moving

When a station changes flight category, a colored stripe on the left edge shows the color it just left — for a full hour. The stripe fades toward the bottom when conditions worsened, toward the top when they improved. One glance answers "getting better or worse?" Works with both the FAA and color-blind safe palettes. On by default; per-action toggle if you'd rather not.

Refresh on demand

One last check before pushback: set On Press to "Refresh now" and a tap fetches fresh METARs immediately, with a checkmark to confirm. On the Cycler, set Dial Press to refresh. Long-press still opens the detail page.

Visibility in meters

Flying outside the US? A new per-action Visibility Unit setting shows visibility in meters and kilometers instead of statute miles.

Also fixed

SPECI now shows an amber marker instead of overlapping the weather icon, station names size to stay clear of it, and metric visibility handles fractions correctly.

Requirements

Stream Deck app 7.1+, Stream Deck + required for Cycler features.