Flightaware Stick Power Consumption

I recently set up my first “piaware”. I have several raspberrypis, so I just repurposed one of them. The problem is, whenever I plug the flightaware usb stick into the pi, I get a low power warning, if I unplug it, it goes away after a minute or so. I can’t find any issue with the pis or the power supplies I have tried. I am currently using a 5v 2.4A power supply with a pi 3B+.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any fixes, or do I just need a powered usb hub?

Thanks in advance!

What’s the power supply you’re using?

Come on!, surely Flightaware know how much current their device draws. Its a simple question.

FYI
i run a pi zero in a box on my chimney fed by a cheap chinese 12v to usb converter from a 2 amp 12v supply no problems so far, the cable is cat5e about 8 metres long using the poe pairs. The pi is running at about 60% processing power.

The power draw is listed here and listed as 300mA
https://flightaware.com/adsb/prostick/

It’s also a question that wasn’t asked? About 300mA is correct.

That doesn’t directly help with the OP’s problem, though. Undervoltage warnings mean that the power supply isn’t maintaining 5V, so all bets are off. The usual culprit is the power supply not meeting the specs it claims, rather than excessive current draw (many PSUs will claim e.g. 5V 2.4A but if you try to actually draw anything like 2.4A, you won’t get 5V)

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Yep the 300mA of a dongle is way under the nominal 500mA maximum of a standard USB 2 port. The pi 3 doesn’t adhere to the usb spec in that regard however, and the 3b has a combined maximum current for its USB ports of 1.2A.

Under specced or faulty psu is definitely the most likely problem.

This:

A write-up from a few days ago.

I’ve done some testing of my own with that - I posted about it before: MLAT problem after upgrade to 3.8.0 - #12 by caius

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