I am really impressed with the way FlightAware has built a very robust, turnkey solution in PiAware. I’ve run PiAware before and think it’s great.
However, I’m now running an RTL-SDR on my CentOS Linux dev box. This computer is used for lots of purposes and is very powerful so running an ADS-B processor in the background is not a big deal.
It’s was very easy to get FR24 (fr24feed) working with dump1090. I have a little BASH script that I built that starts them both up and they are working very well.
I want to add FlightAware to the mix, but this has turned out to be really difficult. I was hoping I could run a FlightAware feeder that would connect to my existing dump1090, but I couldn’t figure that out.
Does anyone have any advice for adding FlightAware to my existing processing?
I run CentOS 8 since I use this box for my day-job development.
Seems you are using pre built Linux binary for fr24feed downloaded from respective site. Seems you built dump1090 from source code. Which version of dump1090 do you use (Malcolm Robb, Mutability, Flightaware)?
For Flightaware data feeder, there is no pre built x86 Linux binary or installation package available (except for RPi armv7). For x86 CentOS, you will have to build it using source code. I tried on Red Hat, but failed. As CentOS & Fedora are based on RedHat, this more or less applies to these also.
I also downloaded and compiled the FlightAware version of dump1090. I was confused and thought that by using the FA version of dump1090, that I would be able to feed FA. I assumed the “feeder” software was built-in to the FA version of dump1090.
I’m surprised by how clunky the PiAware software appears under the hood. I have all the dependencies installed and am trying to build PiAware, but i’m not a TCL expert so I’m stuck.
Given what the PiAware software does, it seems like it should be straightforward to build PiAware on any Linux distribution. I wonder why they use TCL instead of Python.
If anyone can give me some tips on how to get PiAware built/running on CentOS 8, I’d appreciate it. I’ve got the SDR running to feed FR24 so it would be nice to feed the same data to FA.
(1) For this method to work, one has to have a piaware_i386.deb package in hand.
Where is piaware_i386.deb package available? Flightaware repositories have only piaware_armhf.deb package.
(2) Such methods are never 100% guaranteed. It may work, it may fail, or it may work with issues.
Flightaware dont offer Linux binaries for x86 & x64 either, whereas Flightradar24 and Planefinder do offer Linux binaries.
Much of FlightAware’s infrastructure is built using tcl (it’s gradually changing to a wider mix of languages, but certainly at the time that piaware was originally written, there was little to no Python experience at FlightAware).
It’s very straightforward on any Debian-alike. There hasn’t been much demand for CentOS/RedHat package support. If you want to put something together, that’d be great though. piaware_builder and the contents of debian/rules are a good starting point.
As a software developer, TCL has been around for a long time and is relatively fast compared to python. Both work well and when speed counts, you have to use the fastest alternative you can develop with. Both have their strong points and weaknesses.