Actually, that is what I do with a PC fan, I would take a picture, but it is just too hot in the attic today…
I thought of this one, but in my case it would only cool the Pi itself.
I’ll try the 110V non USB version I have, just to see how it goes. It’s sitting here doing nothing. Something to justify its existence.
The fan shim will also ventilate the dongle, at least a little bit.
Not much airflow is needed to make a big difference.
The fan shim is really good, but I fear it is not powerful enough to cool a dongle much as well, especially as the usb and networks ports are in the way as well…
So an hour or so after switching the two Pis over and the Pi 3 is running rock solid with no software changes. No further reboots or weird memory stuff:
I’m certain now that the power supply was causing the problem - hooking it up on the bench and monitoring the voltage under load with the Pi 2 and it was dropping to 4.6V at the output of the PSU, let alone at the Pi. I’m surprised it was running as well as it was considering.
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I’m at a loss why that would cause memory leaks.
Oh well 
My suspicion is that the instability was causing something to restart a lot and not cleanly exit. I think it was possibly the wifi driver, since the connection was very flaky.
This has now arrived and is installed and working OK so far. It’s quite neat.
I measured exactly 5.0V on the GPIO pins while running so the regulation seems fine.
The fan is small but not too noisy considering the size - it would be audible in a quiet room, but it’s not excessive. I have it in the loft anyway so that’s not really a concern.
The fan has made a considerable difference to the cpu temperature:
The temperature in the loft was about 40C today, so I’m happy it’s maintaining 12C over ambient.
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I’m curious, how does the Temperature react to load?
(better benchmark than compiling dump978-fa this time)
sudo apt update
sudo apt install stockfish
hash -r
stockfish bench 512 4 16 default depth
Results on my 3B+ (i stopped my airspy_adsb process)
===========================
Total time (ms) : 60198
Nodes searched : 46851472
Nodes/second : 778289
Temperature went up around 5 C compared to normal airspy duty which is 1 core being pretty much fully utilized.
(It’s quite hot today in Germany, 36 C was the peak for my area today, the attic does have some isolation though)
If you want it to run longer, you can use this command:
stockfish bench 512 4 18 default depth
That does bump the temperature up a fair bit. I didn’t stop dump1090 while it was running.
I’m not surprised though as the fan is pretty small. A larger fan moves a lot more air so will be much more effective. Still, it only went up to about where it was sitting without the fan.
I might add a 120mm fan to get some air moving over the dongle as well - the power hat has 12v output, or can feed up to 5A at 5V so plenty of power available for it.
stress is another app that can test a CPU.
I have found that the small POE fan and a heatsink work really well.
I removed the POEs from a few devices in the attic as I wanted to run GPS/GNSS hats.
I now have the hardware to do both. I will put the POE hats back in the next week and show the change in temps.
This RPI3B+ has a fan and is running a CPU hungry airspy
This RPI3B+ has no fan and runs a lot less CPU than the one above
This is an RPI4 just running a GNSS/GPS hat and NTPD. No fan. It does run dump1090-fa and piaware but no dongle is connected at the moment. It is to replace an old RPI2 in the next week.
Yeah if you really want to load down the CPU, you need a heat sink and a fan.
Still curious what the runtime was, it’s printed when the command finishes.
I don’t anticipate needing it for now - tomorrow is forecast to be 38C, which I think is hotter than I remember it ever being here. I don’t know what temperature the roof space will get to, but I expect hotter than it was today. If the temperatures remain sensible during normal operation I won’t worry about a heat sink.
The results of the longer run were:
Total time (ms) : 161825
Nodes searched : 90659083
Nodes/second : 560229
and the first shorter run were
Total time (ms) : 83847
Nodes searched : 48088937
Nodes/second : 573531
I didn’t stop any other services running, and the Pi is running at standard speed. Normal CPU usage hovers just under 20% overall.
Is that the 3B+ or the model 4?
Must be the 3B+ i guess, the model 4 should be much faster
pinout will tell you the model (I think it is the simplest way to do it).
There are other ways, of course.
It’s a 3B, not a 3B+. Could probably get a bit better score if I stopped everything else.
Edit - The 3B doesn’t have a heatspreader on the CPU, which will make quite a difference when under load. The 3B+ is clocked a bit higher by default.
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Hi all,
I’m very new to all this and have just decided to set up my own Raspberry Pi with piaware and have everything that is required to set it up:
Raspberry Pi4 Model B
FlightAware Pro Stick
16GB SD Card
ADS-B Antenna
I installed piaware onto the SD card following the tutorials but when I inserted the SD card into the Pi4 there was ‘No Signal’ showing on the screen.
Can anyone help me out to get it to work please?
Thanks
Nick
The piaware sd-card is not yet updated to work with the RPi4.
Get Raspian Buster Lite from here:
Raspberry Pi OS – Raspberry Pi
You can use the same process as with the piaware sd-card image to write it to the sd-card.
As you are using a screen, may i assume you also have a keyboard connected?
After booting and logging in, do the following:
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install rpi-update
sudo rpi-update
Yes you need to update to the newest not really tested version, otherwise the Pro Stick won’t work properly.
Do a reboot (sudo reboot).
Install piaware following this guide:
PiAware - dump1090 ADS-B integration with FlightAware - FlightAware
After that you can check out your SkyView page:
http://192.168.2.55/dump1090-fa/
(replace the IP address with the one of your RPi)
If you don’t know the address, you should be able to follow the link on your stats page:
Web Interface: View live data (requires local network connection)
You might want the landing page typical for the piaware sd-card which is available when you type in only the ip address into the browser.
It can be installed like this:
sudo apt install piaware-web
Thank you! I’ve just came across another installation problem. After I have downloaded:
And then go to install with the command i get this error message:
dpkg-deb: error: ‘piaware-repository_3.7.1_all.deb’ is not a Debian format archive
dpkg: error processing archive piaware-repository_3.7.1_all.deb (–install):
dpkg-deb --control subprocess returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
piaware-repository_3.7.1_all.deb
Any ideas on how to fix this?
This sound like a problem with the download. I just verified that it downloads OK here. Try it again and ensure that there are no errors reported by wget?