Viewing only "my" aircraft on FlightAware

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Hi folks,

Is there any filter I can apply to the maps on the FlightAware site to only view the aircraft my two feeds are sending data for?

I’ve got VRS set up at home, and that works well for the device at home, but I’m also using a Pi when I’m out travelling and that seems a bit hit and miss in sending data to my home location. I use SOCAT on the Pi, but the connection drops sometimes and loses the connection - and I’m generally not there to restart it. It starts to send data to FlightAware okay after a drop, but doesn’t restart the SOCAT. I’ve tried setting SOCAT to automatically restart after a dropped connection, but that seems to be killing the sending of data to FlightAware.

So I’m really just looking for a web interface where I can see my data plotted on a map when out and about. Doesn’t have to be through the FlightAware site I guess. VRS actually works really well and I’ve set up my router so I can access that from anywhere - the main issue is the Pi dropping the connection to my home setup (due to dodgy hotel WiFi) means the data from my Pi regularly stops getting there

Regards,

Mark

2

Your flightaware account displays the “internet” ip address for each of your sites.
Assume the ip address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

If port 8080 has been forwarded, you can access your “internet (home)” dump_1090 by entering xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8080 when at a remote location.

3

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. My problem for the Pi in the hotel is that it’s connected to a router (mine) behind a router (the hotels). I can port forward mine, but I have no access to the hotels router, so they’ll be discarding the inbound request.

I can (and do) send data back to my home setup, but that’s where I get the data dropouts. FlightAware seems pretty good at recovering from a dropped connection, but SOCAT not so much. Adding the “forever” option on SOCAT seems to be stopping the data even getting to FlightAware.

Cheers,

Mark

4

I’d suggest running socat in a loop like so:



while true
do
  socat -u TCP:localhost:30005 TCP:server:30004
  sleep 15
done

socat doesn’t really do reconnects itself, I think “forever” mostly affects the initial connection attempt not reestablishing a connection after losing it.

5

Thanks very much - I shall give this a try.

Forgive the newbie question (I’m new to the Pi), but do I just type each line as is at the “command prompt” and hit Enter, or should this be in some sort of file that I should then execute?

Also, will this still allow it to feed to FlightAware? I tried something similar earlier and it seemed to stop sending data to FlightAware whilst it was sending data to my VRS at home.

Thanks again :smiley:

Mark

6

You’ll want to stash it in a file somewhere, add a shell shebang line at the top, and make it executable.

So create a file (“sudo nano /usr/local/bin/pi-tunnel.sh”) containing this:



#!/bin/sh
# ^^ that is the "shebang" line that marks this as being a shellscript

while true
do
  socat -u TCP:localhost:30005 TCP:server:30004
  sleep 15
done

Make it executable:



$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/pi-tunnel.sh

Start it up:



$ /usr/local/bin/pi-tunnel.sh

That will run in the foreground in your shell session; you can kill it with control-C.

Once you’re happy that works you can automate the startup by editing /etc/rc.local (this script is executed during system startup) and adding a call to it before the exit line at the end. You’ll need to background it (“&”) so the startup script doesn’t wait for it to complete before continuing.



/usr/local/bin/pi-tunnel.sh &

None of this should affect the Flightaware feed.

7

Once again, totally awesome response. Thanks so much - this is working fantastically.

:smiley: