FlightAware Discussions

Saving information transmitted to FlightAware locally

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
#1

I have been running PiAware succesfully for over a week now thanks to clear information on this website. I had also previously been able to run PlanePlotter directly off my computer and was able to record logs of everything I was tracking locally.

My question is this. How can I record logs of aircraft positions (Lat, Long, Alt) through my Raspeberry Pi unit either by saving it locally to the mini-SD drive or remotely to another computer?

I get the feeling that I would likely resolve this question by starting with a clean slate, installing Dump1090 and then upgrading to PiAware. Is that correct?

Thanks heaps!

#2

There is nothing provided with piaware/dump1090 that will do that directly.

You might want to look at capturing the output from either port 30003 (Basestation output, CSV formatted decoded messages) or port 10001 (the Flightaware output, TSV formatted periodic aircraft information)

#3

How would one do that?

#4

Left as an exercise for the reader :wink:

Depends very much on what you want to do with the data. netcat would do for basic archiving. If you actually want to search / view the data in something other than a raw form, I don’t know, you’d have to build or find some software to do that.

#5

I used these two examples to get me started on writing my own process to save the dump1090 data to a database on my hosting site.

sbstools.googlecode.com/svn-hist … bserver.py

github.com/lyusupov/Argus/blob/ … dsb2udp.py

Neither one was a perfect solution for what I wanted to accomplish, but they got me thinking in the right direction.

Marty

#6

I really would like dump1090 to log to a mysql database. I found an old branch on github that adds mysql support, but I haven’t had time to check it out: https://github.com/antirez/dump1090/pull/19/commits

#7

+1

#8

Where is the TSV format (sent by dump1090 on port 10001) documented? I’ve been Googling my tail off and haven’t found it!

#9

It is not really documented at all beyond what’s in the code. It’s the format that PiAware uses to upload data to FlightAware, and the details change from version to version as it’s really an internal format. At the most basic level there is one record per line, each line has tab-separated key-value pairs, the meanings of most keys should be selfexplanatory.

nb: current versions of dump1090 don’t expose this on a network port; it is now generated by faup1090 which is a cut-down dump1090 that reads from a network datasource and emits summaries on stdout. You can just run faup1090 directly if you want to take a look (on a running piaware, look in ps for the faup1090 command line and run it in the same way, it won’t interfere to have a second copy)

#10

I wrote something to help us all w/ this:

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