I recently had to rebuild my PiAware. I flashed the 8.2 image to an SD card and booted from it, it quickly changed the partition size, rebooted, displayed the PiAware loading screen, then went to a black screen with a number of errors about “Failed to start Bluetooth LE” and “Failed to start Flask application to configure PiAware settings”, and never displayed the usual information screen showing network status and PiAware status. Alt-F1 does not take me to the status page.
I reflashed the SD card multiple times; I tried multiple, brand-new SD cards; and I also tried multiple Raspberry Pis, including one brand-new one out of the box, but every time the exact same issue.
After hours of trial and error, I finally discovered that even with the errors on the screen, I could connect to the PiAware over the network as long as the Pi is using a wired network connection. The PiAware status web page shows nothing is running or working (all red statuses–“PiAware doesn’t appear to be running”), however, the SkyAware web page (:8080) does show that the receiver is capturing signals and I can see flights within range of my system.
I have never had this much of a problem getting PiAware to work. I just successfully went through this process a couple of weeks ago and I am at a total loss. Any ideas?
Hello and welcome to the forum. You didn’t mention, have you first edited piaware-config.txt in the boot partition with your wifi details (and create a blank file in there called ssh if you want ssh access enabled), before transferring to the RPi to boot for the first time?
Thank you for your reply.
Yes, I did edit the config file to include my WiFi SSID and passkey. My passkey uses special characters, so I also tried it with and without quotes around the passkey.
The quote marks need to be straight quote marks, not smart quotes.
It might be easier though to attach a monitor and keyboard and use raspi-config to set the wifi details.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html
You can also set the WiFi details in Rapberry Pi Imager if select the advanced options and you burn the image using that.
If you don’t have luck getting it to work with the above instructions, give this a try: A simple way to feed ADS-B data
It should handle any wifi password you configure via the hotspot webinterface.
Make sure you also add wireless-network set to yes to enable wifi. The piaware-config.txt file itself explains how to quote non-standard characters in your wifi password. You can copy and paste that example in there and edit the password if you want to be sure it’s quoted correctly. Perhaps you can change the wifi password to use standard uppercase, lowercase and numbers and make it around 20 characters long. That would rule out odd characters being a problem.
Since you have access to the wired network, I would focus on getting PiAware working, feeding and showing locally with that, since it eliminates all the wifi connectivity aspects. Once it’s working with that, you can shut it down, disconnected the ethernet cable, return to piaware-config.txt and set up your network. That way it will either be right and work, or not right and you’ll know it’s related to wifi authentication.
As wiedehopf suggests, you can also try the installer explained in the thread he links to, but there is no reason why you should not be able to get a standard PiAware up and running, so it comes down to whether you just want to get it online or solve what is going on.
Solution: Don’t unZIP the download before flashing it with Etcher.
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