Hi
I have just bought a Pi 3 and want to run a program to watch flights displayed on a map.
Having installed piaware and set it up it works fine, but I want it to be self contained and not have to use the PC to view the maps.
How do I 1 - enable wifi ? I cannot find the piaware-config.txt file anywhere on the SD card. And 2 - how can I use the Pi to run a browser at the same time as I don’t want to use the PC ?
Many thanks
Midi
You can view the live Skyview map on any device that can connect to your PiAware. PiAware only does the processing of ADSB transponder messages to plane positions. It doesn’t do the mapping software locally. If you want to have a self contained system you would need to use another mapping program than the free “open street maps” that is used by piaware.
How do I 1 - enable wifi ? I cannot find the piaware-config.txt file anywhere on the SD card. And 2 - how can I use the Pi to run a browser at the same time as I don’t want to use the PC ?
You can enable wifi by editing the /boot/piaware-config.txt file (this is found on the root directory when viewing the SD card directly from a PC). There are instructions here on what settings you need for wifi:
PiAware - Advanced Configuration Settings - FlightAware
PiAware only does the output of ADSB transponder messages to plane positions. It doesn’t run mapping software locally. You would need another program that does mapping part. Piaware uses “open street maps” by default. There are programs like VirtualRadar, Avare, Foreflight, Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc. You can try to run your own mapping software locally on the Pi but in most cases a cellphone or a PC computer is just much easier.
There are also ways to run the system in Wifi Access point mode. But this also requires a separate PC.
Hi David
Thank you for your reply. I had a good look for the config file but as the image file I used was not from your site hence there was no config file. However, I have now download the image file from the piaware site and have found the config text file and it is now running over wifi and without any login passwords. This now means I do not need the keyboard connected and if there is a power cut then it will re-boot unaided.
I will have to look into the display and being new to Linux it might take awhile.
Thanks
Midi
If your original image file was from Raspberry Pi OS – Raspberry Pi , it can be configured for wifi and ssh (i.e. without keyboard and monitor).
Only the method to activate these in Piaware and Raspbian images is different, but end result is same.
Last time I tried to run a browser in a GUI ON THE RASPBERRY, the hardware wasn’t powerful enough to display the map. So I use an old smartphone instead. You can actually use a USB-to-go cable and plug and RTL-SDR dongle directly into a smartphone. Will be tricky to set up as you’'d have to manually install dump1090 etc on the phone.
Easier to have two separate devices: 1x Rasperry pi to get the data and serve the webpage (mine is in the roof near the antenna) and 1x old smartphone to see the webpage on the Pi