Lost it!

I’ve reloaded my RPi2 with Jessie but have totally lost how to feed Flightaware!!

I have Beast data available on my network from a standalone receiver so I now need to know how to configure PiAware which I’ve reinstalled. I don’t think I can configure Dump1090 to take network data instead of RTL data can I?

Any help would be appreciated.

Michael

You can run dump1090 in network-only mode without a dongle, use the option “–net-only” instead of “–net”

If your Beast decoder can send output to a specific port/ip, point it to dump1090’s IP and Beast input port.

Otherwise, if your Beast decoder sits around waiting for clients to connect to a certain port, you’ll have connect to it and forward it to dump1090’s Beast input port. Use software like modesmixer, or you can just do something like this on your pi:

wget -q -O - beastIP:beastPort | nc localhost 30004 (or localhost 30104, or whatever ip and port dump1090 is listening to Beast input)

edit: see obj’s post below for a better method than using wget!

Aaah, yes, ModesMixer forgot about that! However the wget command I’m interested in understanding the nc local host 30004 part. I understand the Beast IP and Port but I’m unsure of the part after the pipe. After running that, what should come next? Just PiAware?

Just to mention I have this running after installing PiAware:

/usr/lib/piaware/helpers/fa-mlat-client --input-connect localhost:30005 --results beast,connect,localhost:30104 --udp-transport 70.42.6.198:7670:500269842

After your receiver and dump1090 are both running, it’s one way to “connect” the two. wget grabs data from some host/port, piped to nc which uploads to another host/port.

I should have clarified “localhost 30004” should be the IP and beast input port of dump1090. So, 30104 for those running Flightaware’s dump1090 version.

wget is not the right tool to use here (amazingly, it actually kinda works because it assumes it is talking to a HTTP/0.9 server, but it’s really not the right tool!)

Try socat:



$ socat -u TCP:receiverhost:receiverport TCP:localhost:30104


assuming you have dump1090 listening in --net-only mode on port 30104. You will want to wrap that in a script to restart it when it exits.

If you want to avoid running dump1090 entirely, something like this might work (untested)



$ socat -u TCP-LISTEN:localhost:30005,fork TCP:receiverhost:receiverport


The next piaware version should have built-in support for pulling data from an external receiver.

The order of things is alluding me and socat just fails to work complaining about the number of addresses with any combination of in/out permutations.

So resorting back to modesmixer2 I have it connected to my Beast TCP data and an outServer on port 3014 so now how does Piaware read and send that Beast format data? Here’s my modesmixer string:

modesmixer2 --inConnect 192.168.1.6.3xxxx --outServer beast:30104 --web 8080 &

I see traffic in from Beast on the web interface but nothing going to Flightaware from Piaware!

OK, got it now:

modesmixer2 inConnect 192.168.1.6.3xxxx --outServer beast:30005 --web 8080 &

It was just the port number I got wrong.

Thanks, waiting for the next version of PiAware for direct network support.

Cheers,
Michael