PiAware on zero w

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering peoples views on running PiAware on a pi zero w? Is it up to the job? Is it better to use a pi 4? I have a spare of both and about to reinstall PiAware.

If you want to run anything extra i’d go with the pi4.
The pi zero w will work but you should pretty much only feed 1 or maybe 2 sites.
If you want to run extra stuff like graphs1090 / tar1090 that might work on the pi zero w but it will be close in regards to CPU.

Then it very much depends on how many planes you receive and how you set the gain.
High gain settings usually use up more CPU.

If you want to do something like run VRS on the pi … only the pi4 will work, the pi zero w won’t.

If you want the best reception the pi4 is recommended as it supplies the SDR with a more reliable 5V via USB. (at least that’s my opinion)

I’ve been running the pi zero w for around 7 months now. I only have one site and it’s doing a fairly good job. I do notice upon reboot the system will alert the cpu usage is fairly high and recommends upgrading, however the alert (under view anomalies) goes away after a few mins.

I’d say give the pi zero try and have a pi 4 on standby if you’re not happy with it.

Thank you for a great answer. I will probably be feeding 3 sites and I like sharing. I will be running graphs190 and some python code to monitor the temperature of my loft. I didn’t even thing of the 5v reliability, I think I did see somewhere that the pi zero could be a little lacking. I have also read somewhere that the lack of a stable 5v can really upset the PiAware setup (cant remember if it referred to the Flightaware hardware). I think the Pi 4 it is.

I may do a test setup with the zero. Thank you for your input.

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Please brows this thread:

Re-imaging Made Easy

 

Thank you, everything I need in one place. :+1:

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