New Pro Stick Plus stopped working after a few days

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

My setup:

  • RaspberryPi Model 2 B+
  • Pro Stick Plus dongle (PSP)
  • 1090Mhz Antenna MCX
  • Powered USB2.0 Hub for the PSP
  • Edimax Wifi dongle plugged into the pi’s onboard USB
  • 2.5a PSU on the pi
  • Piaware via the Debian package add-on
  • No other devices, attached, no other apps or programs in use besides SSH

Setup went smoothly, and the system reported steadily for a few days: https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/digittante

Now, it seems, the PSP is non-responsive, and knocks out the wifi dongle as well. The system will boot and connect to flightaware.com w/o the PSP attached, but not with. Same results whether I (1) plug the PSP directly into the pi USB and the wifi into the 2nd hub, (2) plug both the PSP and wifi into the pi USB, (3) use a 3a PSU on the pi, (4) set max_usb_current=1 in the pi’s /boot/config.txt, (5) boot w/ latest Piaware OS build, (6) replace the wifi dongle with another.

W/o the PSP attached, Piaware status yields:

PiAware master process (piaware) is running with pid 472.
PiAware ADS-B client (faup1090) is not running.
PiAware mlat client (fa-mlat-client) is not running.
Local ADS-B receiver (dump1090) is not running.

no program appears to be listening for connections on port 30005.
faup1090 is NOT connected to the ADS-B receiver.
piaware is connected to FlightAware.

got ‘couldn’t open socket: connection refused’
dump1090 is NOT producing data on localhost:30005.

Thoughts/suggestions welcome.

thanks!

digittante

3

You can see if the USB device is listed as connected with the command “lsusb”

If the device isn’t being detected you can also check if there was any errors loading the dongle in dmesg or the /var/log/syslog

“dmesg | grep usb” and look for device with idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2832 , Product: RTL2832UFA

It would also check with the dongle connected directly to a USB port instead of through a hub.

4

UPDATE: Tried one more thing: with the Pro Stick Plus plugged directly into the pi, and no other devices, I’ve connected to the LAN via a cable. After a reboot, Piaware status yields:

PiAware master process (piaware) is running with pid 457.
PiAware ADS-B client (faup1090) is running with pid 565.
PiAware mlat client (fa-mlat-client) is running with pid 934.
Local ADS-B receiver (dump1090-fa) is running with pid 456.

dump1090-fa (pid 456) is listening for connections on port 30005.
faup1090 is connected to the ADS-B receiver.
piaware is connected to FlightAware.

dump1090 is producing data on localhost:30005.

But lsusb (thank you david.baker) shows no receiver:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0424:ec00 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMSC9512/9514 Fast Ethernet Adapter
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0424:9514 Standard Microsystems Corp. SMC9514 Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

And there’s no data, no planes detected. Station is 12 miles from major international airport.

Anything else to try?

AMD

5

Thank you, David. Seems the on-board USB repeatedly finds the PSP but can’t use it. dmesg excerpt below:

[ 187.816772] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change
[ 188.356054] usb 1-1.5: new high-speed USB device number 127 using dwc_otg
[ 188.497980] usb 1-1.5: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2832
[ 188.497997] usb 1-1.5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 188.498009] usb 1-1.5: Product: RTL2832U
[ 188.498018] usb 1-1.5: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 188.498029] usb 1-1.5: SerialNumber: 00001000
[ 188.506245] usb 1-1.5: dvb_usb_v2: found a ‘Realtek RTL2832U reference design’ in warm state
[ 188.540766] dvb_usb_rtl28xxu: probe of 1-1.5:1.0 failed with error -71
[ 188.541518] usb 1-1.5: USB disconnect, device number 127
[ 188.736388] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change
[ 189.926673] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change
[ 190.466024] usb 1-1.5: new high-speed USB device number 5 using dwc_otg
[ 190.603950] usb 1-1.5: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=2832
[ 190.603970] usb 1-1.5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 190.604932] usb 1-1.5: can’t set config #1, error -71
[ 190.682998] usb 1-1-port2: over-current change
[ 190.916348] usb 1-1.5: USB disconnect, device number 5

:frowning:

6

dmesg output above generated w/ normal pi USB power setting (after I removed “max_usb_current=1” from /boot/config.txt and rebooted)…

7

Thank you. Happy to RMA it for a replacement through the online vendor I bought it from. Is that the next step?

8

Definitely power related, but given that you’ve swapped out the PSU and tried different hub setups etc it’s probably the dongle at fault. I’d RMA it.

Possibly unrelated (maybe you were trying this on a vanilla Raspbian?) but that driver should be blacklisted if you want to use the rtlsdr in SDR mode for dump1090 et al.