So please bear with me while I explain. I’m running on a PiZero, and it’s only running piaware plus dump1090. It’s from a purchased PiAware SD card so should be clean. It has been updated to 5.0 recently.
Now it doesn’t have a particularly good antenna, so doesn’t see that many aircraft. In general it is stable. So today, I installed a decent antenna on a pole on the shed. I moved the system, connected up and it worked, seeing loads more aircraft. But only for a few minutes before dump 1090 crashed. Restarted a dozen times, same each time. Moved it back to the location with a poor antenna and all is well.
I tend to keep a window open on my laptop viewing Skyaware directly on the Pi.
So, is it that my system is not capable of dealing with so many signals and an open skyaware servicing session? Do I need a more powerful Pi? Or is there something else that it could be?
Thanks for the reply. To me reducing the gain seems to be a bit of a waste of the new, better antenna. But I guess it could be a simple way of proving that’s the issue. What I’d prefer to do, if it’s likely that it’s the problem, is change the Pi to one where the CPU is capable. I do have one ordered for something else that might fit the bill (Pi4 B).
I’m fairly confident it’s not the PSU. It’s an original Pi official one, and only about 10 months old. The fact that it went back to working fine with the old antenna with less signal is why I think that. I guess I could swap it out for the PSU that came with my Pi4 (or is Pi4 USBC?). But I doubt it’s that.
Hi. each time, the Pi reported via skyaware that it wasn’t receiving any data from dump 1090. Also the skyaware screen went from displaying 20-30 aircraft signals to none. I don’t have logs, I’m not sure how I would get them. I run the Pi headless, so everything I see is via the skyaware page I see when accessing it on it’s local IP address. I can try getting logs but in spite of years of computing experience I find Linux a special kind of inaccessible.
I’m willing to but that’s what I mean about Linux. I have no idea what SSH is or how I would perform it from my laptop. On the other hand I can move the kit back and take some screenshots no problem.
As I mentioned, I’m not inexperienced with computing, having learned programming back in the late seventies. I still write embbedded C for Arduino and PIC. but just find commands like SUDO completely unintelligible and how to ‘apply’ such commands somewhat confusing.
Sorry it’s been an age, but have just got around to enabling SSH and using it. I can now communicate with the Pi. Later on I will trasnfer it to the more sensitive antenna, see if I get the same issue, and post what I find.
Just another update. I’m starting to be convinced it’s a CPU issue, before even moving back to the better antenna. Having managed to SSH in I’m now also able to interrogate CPU usage. With the poorly placed, low gain antenna, dealing with up to four aircraft, I’m running around 60% CPU. So I guess it’s not surprising that when there are tens or more of signals to deal with, it can’t cope.
In a way, I was prompted to do this, because even with the poor antenna, it seems to have been a busy day for flights locally and it ‘fell over’ twice earlier though before I’d sorted the SSH access, so I still don’t have logs for those failures.
Does anyone know if I can simply put the existing SD card into a more powerful Pi without too much grief?
Yes that would be a possibility. Only catch I can think of is that the network interface can be named different so you need to hook it up to a local monitor in order to modify that if needed.
Other thing to consider is that the Wi-Fi chip can be different on a different model and thus needing another driver.
That can be fixed by running an update on the Raspberry Pi.
As long as you give is a DHCP adres that isn’t an issue but usually you will give a fixed ip adres to a flightfeeder.
CPU load is mostly independent of the number of aircraft (the bulk of the work is in scanning the raw samples for messages; actually decoding messages once they’re found is relatively cheap)
Hi. Sorry for the delay in getting back. I’ve not had time to move the unit so it’s been behaving. Yesterday it did the same thing, so now I have some more info.
I have a window always open so I can quickly view data. When it stops, all of the arcraft data stops, and I get an error message.
I’ll attach a screenshot of the error message, but it says 'Problem fetching data from Dump1090, AJAX call failed (error), maybe dump 1090 is no longer running? The displayed map data will be out of date.
So I tried to SSH as suggested, but I get a ‘the operation timed out’ error where I know it worked OK before. Also if I try to browse to the Pi in a new window I get ‘Safari can’t connect to the server’.
It looks to me like the whole Pi is falling over.
Is there anything else I can try before resetting?
I think your Ajax failure report you are seeing on your terminal window might be caused by the fact that there is no network connectivity to your Pi.
Since it can’t be pinged no data can be sent as well.
How is the Pi connected to the network ? Wireless ?
If so maybe it is an option to connect is via a network cable to see if that improves the situation ?
