Newbie Questions

I received the hardware today for my PiAware system and it was super easy to get going. Needless to say I’ve not gotten much work done. :open_mouth:

I do have a couple of questions. 1)When I first booted up, it prompted me for the PiAware user. I entered my ID and PW, but it didn’t seem to take. Then I got an email that I was sending data. I tried logging in again, but it won’t accept it. Obviously I don’t need the PW to send data, but I’d like to be able to login and play with stuff, plus change the default Pi password.

  1. Looking at the local data, I see lots of planes in the table that are not showing up on the map. I understand this is probably Mode S transponders, but why do I sometimes (not often) see flight numbers (tail numbers) but sometimes don’t. Does or can they system do a reverse lookup on the ICAO against the FAA’s registration database to get the tail number? I’ve attached a link to the screen shot.

Awesome product!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/92145512@N04/15546222085/

Which instructions did you follow? You shouldn’t normally have to enter a username or password to get started. However, the username is “pi” and password is “raspberry” if you want to directly login to the Raspberry Pi. Is that what you’re trying or something else?

  1. Looking at the local data, I see lots of planes in the table that are not showing up on the map. I understand this is probably Mode S transponders, but why do I sometimes (not often) see flight numbers (tail numbers) but sometimes don’t. Does or can they system do a reverse lookup on the ICAO against the FAA’s registration database to get the tail number? I’ve attached a link to the screen shot.

In your screenshot, the ones with speed/track are ADS-B and the rest are Mode S without ADS-B.

Flight number is an optional element on Mode S or ADS-B. Some operators choose to enter it and some don’t. Not everyone who enters it enters it correctly. For example, the FDX flight on your screen looks correct but the other numbers are not. When you send data to FlightAware.com, we try to correct a lot of these errors for you when we can correlate it with other data, so eventually your interface to tracking flights via your receiver on FlightAware will be better than on your local web interface.

Yes, the ICAO hex ID can be turned into a tail number for most aircraft and we do this with the data that’s fed back to us, which is how we often correlate tail number to fligh tnumber. The local doesn’t have support for this (yet) but I don’t see why it couldn’t in the future.

Awesome product!

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback…it will help us improve it for everyone.

is the PiAware unit runs alone ones installed or need to be connected to a computer to operate all time?

It runs without a computer, all by itself.