ATAK Plugin — Traffic
Download Traffic 0.8 (pick the one matching your ATAK-CIV version, sideload, then load it in ATAK's Plugins manager):
- ATAK-CIV 5.6: https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/releases/download/v0.8/ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.8--5.6.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.7: https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/releases/download/v0.8/ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.8--5.7.0-civ-release.apk
- ATAK-CIV 5.8: https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/releases/download/v0.8/ATAK-Plugin-Traffic-0.8--5.8.0-civ-release.apk
All releases: https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/releases
User guide with screenshots: docs/USER_GUIDE.md (https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/blob/main/docs/USER_GUIDE.md)
PURPOSE AND CAPABILITIES
Live traffic overlay for ATAK. Draws current road traffic above whatever base map the operator has already selected, and keeps it refreshing while the map sits still.
ATAK can already display an online tile source, and a MOBAC source can declare a refresh interval. Two things stop that from producing a live overlay. The interval is only honored while the map is being drawn, so a device that pans stays current and a device sitting on a desk silently goes stale -- which is the state an operator is usually in when they want to read traffic. And a composited multi-layer source is built with no refresh interval at all, so the one arrangement that puts traffic over an operator's own base map is the one arrangement that cannot refresh.
This plugin owns its own overlay layer and drives the refresh itself.
Capabilities:
- Traffic drawn above the operator's chosen base map, which stays visible underneath. Imagery, topo or vector -- the overlay does not replace it.
- Refreshes on a wall clock while the map is untouched, at an interval the operator selects (15 seconds to 10 minutes).
- Holds while the screen is off, and refreshes immediately on wake. Nothing can render with the display off, so refreshing then would spend battery to no purpose; what matters is being current the moment the device is picked up. The status says so explicitly when tiles arrived because the device was woken, rather than leaving the operator to infer it from a recent timestamp.
- Manual refresh that takes effect at once rather than at the next interval.
- A status line reporting when tiles genuinely last arrived, read from the tile cache rather than from the plugin's own timer, so a stalled network shows as a timestamp that stops moving rather than one that keeps ticking over a frozen picture.
- One tap on and off, from the plugin pane, with the state shown as a color-coded ON or OFF rather than buried in a sentence.
- Highway shields drawn above the traffic colors, so a route number stays readable where the traffic line would otherwise cover it.
Road incidents (511), new in 0.7:
- Crashes, closures, lane closures, road work, hazards, vehicle fires, chain control, weather and message signs from every US state's traveler information system, drawn as icons. No road lines: traffic flow comes from the traffic overlay above.
- The operator picks the states they care about; the first run offers the state they are in.
- Each type can be switched off, drawn only past a chosen zoom, and limited to what is in view or a radius around the operator or the map center.
- Tapping an incident opens its details, which keep updating while open: what, where, the reporting agency, when it was reported and last updated, responding units where the agency publishes them (California Highway Patrol), and message signs drawn as the sign reads.
- Refreshes every 15 seconds while the screen is on.
STATUS
Version 0.8: road incidents from all 50 states (see PURPOSE AND CAPABILITIES), and highway shields above the traffic colors. The pane offers to add the state under the map even where a picked state is close by, and the incident settings page opens at its top. A new manual covers both layers. Verified on ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.5 (official build) on a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, and on 5.8.0.3 (dev build) on a Samsung Galaxy S10.
Version 0.7 was the build the 0.8 manual's pictures were taken from; it was not released.
Version 0.6: one versionCode per APK. The same plugin as 0.5, rebuilt so that each ATAK target's APK carries its own versionCode, the plugin version and the ATAK version folded into one integer, which lets an MDM hold all three builds and push each one as an update. Nothing else changed.
Version 0.5. Verified on ATAK-CIV 5.7.0.5.
Exercised on hardware: Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, ATAK-CIV 5.8.0.3, as a release (proguard) build. Verified on device, with the map untouched throughout:
- Refresh on a still map at the selected interval, confirmed against tile arrival rather than screenshots.
- No refresh while the screen is off, across several interval boundaries.
- Refresh within about three seconds of the device being unlocked.
- Manual refresh taking effect a full interval before the next scheduled one, with the configured interval correctly restored afterwards.
Prepared for tak.gov third-party submission.
POINT OF CONTACTS
Andreas Johansson, takwerx https://github.com/takwerx/traffic/issues
PORTS REQUIRED
(This is important for ATO, networking, and other security concerns)
Outbound TCP 443 (HTTPS) only, and only while the operator has the overlay or the road incidents turned on and the device screen is awake.
The plugin streams map tiles from a Google tile endpoint, mt1.google.com. This is an undocumented, unauthenticated endpoint -- no API key is used or required. Requests carry no credentials and no device identity.
What leaves the device is the set of tile coordinates covering the visible map area, at the operator's selected refresh interval. Tile coordinates are derived from the map viewport, so the operator's area of interest is inferable by the tile provider at the resolution of a map tile. This is inherent to any streamed tile source and is stated here so it is not a surprise.
Traffic is requested at whatever interval the operator selects, default 60 seconds. Turning the overlay off, or the screen off, stops all traffic immediately. Highway shields come from the same Google endpoint, as a second tile layer over the same area.
Road incidents (511) come from takwerx's own server, cams.takwerx.org, path /traffic511/. The device asks it for a small index every 15 seconds and for the file of each state the operator picked when that file has changed (conditional GET, If-Modified-Since). Requests carry no credentials and no device identity; what the server can infer is which states were picked. The server gathers the data from each state's public traveler information system; the device never contacts a state agency itself.
No inbound ports. No listening sockets. No traffic to or from the TAK server, and no CoT is generated or consumed. With the overlay and the road incidents off the plugin makes no network calls at all.
Tiles are cached by ATAK's own imagery cache, in the standard imagecache location, and are subject to ATAK's cache management.
EQUIPMENT REQUIRED
Android device supported by ATAK-CIV 5.6, 5.7 or 5.8. A network connection while the overlay is in use. Traffic is live data and has no meaningful offline mode -- cached tiles are, by definition, old traffic. Negligible storage: tiles land in ATAK's existing imagery cache; road incidents are held in a small per-session database under ATAK's tools directory, replaced each time the plugin starts.
EQUIPMENT SUPPORTED
Any Android device supported by ATAK. No additional or external hardware, no sensors, no peripherals.
COMPILATION
Standard ATAK plugin build. Set sdk.path in local.properties to an unpacked ATAK CIV SDK, then:
./gradlew assembleCivDebug
./gradlew assembleCivRelease
ext.ATAK_VERSION in app/build.gradle selects the ATAK release to target.
The tile source is a MOBAC custom map source XML shipped in the plugin's assets (app/src/main/assets/mapsources/). Adding a source is a matter of adding an XML file and one list entry; the refresh mechanism is not specific to traffic and applies to any short-lived tile source.
DEVELOPER NOTES
The refresh mechanism is a heartbeat, not a cache operation. ATAK's map surface renders on demand -- GLMapSurface sets RENDERMODE_WHEN_DIRTY -- and MobacTileReader.start(), which is the only place that expires cached tiles and advances the tile version, is called from the draw path. With a still map there are no draws, so no interval however short will fire. The plugin forces a draw pump on a timer (SurfaceRendererControl.markDirty plus RenderContext.requestRefresh) and lets ATAK's own machinery do the expiry, the version bump, the refetch and the repaint.
Expiring tiles is not sufficient on its own. GLQuadTileNode4 re-reads a tile when its tile version changes, and the version is incremented only inside the interval gate in MobacTileReader.start(). A refresh requested partway through an interval therefore expires the cache and changes nothing visible until the interval elapses. Forcing an immediate refresh means briefly setting the refresh interval to 1 ms so the gate passes, pumping, and restoring the real interval -- left dropped, the layer refetches every frame.
The refresh interval is set on the live layer at runtime through OnlineImageryExtension, obtained with Layer2.getExtension. This is what makes a composited overlay refreshable at all, since the multi-layer MOBAC parser passes no interval. Note that OnlineImageryExtension is marked deprecated (since 5.3) while remaining in use by ATAK's own layer manager in 5.8; it is the version-sensitive part of this plugin and should be re-checked on any ATAK upgrade.
The overlay is a plugin-owned DatasetRasterLayer2 over a RuntimeRasterDataStore, added at MapView.RenderStack.RASTER_OVERLAYS. That is what puts it above the base map: ATAK's Native and Mobile imagery are mutually exclusive cards of a single CardLayer, so selecting one deselects the other and no arrangement within the layer manager can stack them.
Freshness is measured from the tile cache file's modification time, whose path comes from the layer descriptor's offlineCache extra. A successful fetch always writes, whether or not the tile content changed; a failed fetch writes nothing. So the timestamp means "tiles arrived", which is the question worth answering, and a dead network freezes it. It does not mean the traffic picture changed.
Passing a null working directory when creating the dataset descriptor does not avoid the disk cache: MobacMapSourceLayerInfoSpi also honors the global ConfigOptions imagery.offline-cache-dir, which ATAK sets. The cache, and its one-week expiry floor, apply regardless -- defeating that floor is what the refresh interval is for.
Anything written by the plugin must go to ATAK's context, not the plugin context. The plugin package's data directory cannot be created by ATAK's process and every write there fails with ENOENT. Assets are still read through the plugin context.
A plugin resource id passed to a dialog built on ATAK's context resolves against ATAK's resources, not the plugin's, and silently produces the wrong string. Resolve strings with pluginContext.getString before handing them to a dialog. Dialogs themselves must use ATAK's context, which has a window token; the plugin context does not.
LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2026 Andreas Johansson (TAKWERX).
Traffic is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later), with an additional permission for the TAK Software so that this plugin may be built against the TAK SDK, loaded into ATAK and distributed without the AGPL reaching into ATAK itself.
You may run it, study it, modify it, and share it -- for any purpose, commercial or not, with no fee and no per-seat license. What the AGPL adds over a permissive license is a guarantee that it stays free: modify Traffic and pass it on, and the people you pass it to are owed the complete corresponding source of your version under the same license. Nobody can take this, close it, and sell it back to the emergency-services community.
If you only install and use Traffic, this obligation never touches you. Running it, in any agency, on any number of devices, triggers nothing.
Scope. The AGPL covers Traffic's own code. It does not change the license of the TAK Software, which stays under the TAK Software License Agreement, and it does not cover the parts of this repository scaffolded from the TAK-SDK plugin template -- those are listed under Provenance in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md. No SDK binary is distributed here.
Contributions are welcome -- see CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution terms and the Contributor License Agreement.