Are the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 boards a good fit for running PiAware? I’m looking to down size the full system for enclosure and mounting it higher.
Are there problems with overheating or high CPU usage? It will be a dedicated pi for the project.
Any first hand experience or knowledge of them would be helpful in my decision making process.
In general its no problem.
If you run a Flightaware stick or any other similar device it works.
There will be only issues if you want to use a high performance stick like an Airspy Mini.
It will depend on how much air traffic your location sees on a daily basis. If you are in a low to medium traffic location, I expect it would suffice. I started out with a Zero and I found out it was overloading the CPU because I live in a high-density air traffic location and it was not sufficiently robust enough to deal with the load.
The Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 4 gig gives you some nice connectivity options and more than enough memory.
Thanks. I have been using a 3 and 4b on two separate sights. The 3 is in doors and 4b outside. A day or two ago I got a notification that the usb receiver was overheating which I had never seen before. Good to hear the zero handle the loss. I’m in central Missouri so I have STL and KC traffic as well as 3 or 4 small airports. Guess I’ll just give it a try.
Next is figure out some enclosure and cooling method. I appreciate your input
If your antenna dongle is directly plugged in to the USB on the Pi that can contribute to the overtemp. I isolate my dongle from the RPi USB port with a good quality short 2.0 USB extender cable. That gives you some nice heat isolation and removes any physical connection loads at the connection site.
I actually did that the day it overheated.
If the device is used as a feeder only, 4 GB is simply waste of money. It works with 1 GB absolutely flawless.
Agreed that the 1 Gig is absolutely good enough. I like to build in a bit of headroom for any future requirements. Run data shows memory use well under the 1 gig.
In general there are not many situations where a full powered Raspberry in headless mode is required. Even a LAMP server can be running without issues on lower memory.
It looks different if you start using the Raspberry as a desktop device or Multimedia-Box which requires power and memory.
I have a spare Raspberry 3B and use it with an Airspy stick plus filter receiving up to 200 aircraft in peak time… The device CPU runs constantly at >60% utilization or above, but RAM is still plenty free.
Hi Foxhunter, is this a typo? Guess you meant a Airspy mini?
Or did I miss something on the Jetvision page?
Good catch. I meant the Airspy - corrected. Thanks!