Why does my system keep stopping reporting?

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

It has worked pretty much flawless for about 9 months and now it stops reporting. I unplugged it from the power source and it started working again and now 2 days later it has stopped reporting once again.

Should I update the software on the SD card?

I also get:

Anomaly report for PiAware feeder with a MAC address of b:
This feeder last checked in on Monday.
This feeder is not being used for multilateration because its timing information appears to be unreliable. This can be caused by the site location being incorrect, or because your Pi is running out of free CPU.

Ideas?

2

FlightAware Support here.

Are you running the pre-built PiAware and nothing else on the RPi?

If you have one, try installing PiAware on a new SD card. And/or a different SDR dongle.

3

I know it’s been running for 9 months, but I have seen this issue twice in my many setups.

1.) power supply is going bad and the power is not in spec or dropping out, if you watch it for awhile do you see the red power light blink at all?

2.) the Pi is going bad, I had one that would load, run, then die, after trying a new image, then new power supply, I just had to replace the board.

4

This has been a PiAWare use only from day one… So it sounds like time to buy a new Raspberry then. I have a second one I built as a Stratux but that’s not the most reliable thing as of yet so maybe change the card and use it for PiAWare and get a new one once Stratux is more refined.

5

My new system stopped last evening. It is a new Rasp pi, less than a month old, and only has PiAware loaded.

The red light was on solid, but I could not restart the system through “My ADS-B” because of a message that said something about no logs.

Help needed.

6

For whatever it’s worth, my system was periodically stopping reporting too. It turned out to be due to the RTL dongle disconnecting. if you run:


dmesg -T

It shows some usb stats, and I could see the USB dongle connecting and reconnecting.

Even with a 3a power supply, the RTL dongle I got drew too much power for the Pi so I was running it off a powered hub. The Hub was a piece of junk, and replacing it with a better model resulted in no more disconnects.

If the dongle disconnects, dump1090 freaks out so - best to keep this connection solid. If you connect the dongle through a quality powered hub you might have better results.

Gnuse: The red light on the pi means the system is halted. Unplug and replug. If that keeps happening, might need a better power supply.

7

The red led is tied directly to the 3.3v rail. There is no logic to its control. If it’s blinking, the the power is so low, it can’t even power a led…

8

That is true of the RPi A and B, but on the B+ and RPi 2, there is indeed logic controlling the LED. When my pi is on and running (this is an RPI2, mind you) the light is off. The only time it lights up is when I send a halt command, or when the system is first booting up.

More:
From
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58151

On the model A and B the PWR LED was simply connected to power, but on later models of the Pi it is controlled by a “brownout detector” which will switch the LED off whenever the Pi receives insufficient power…The condition can also be read from software; the software can also override the brownout detector, and control the PWR LED directly.

So, unsure if my Pi isn’t powered properly but it’s very stable. Maybe the software is overriding the led. Going to look into this further.

9

This was true on the Pi 1 I think but on the Pi 2 they’re software-controllable.

Try “echo heartbeat | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/led1/trigger” :slight_smile:

10

Ugh… These times are a changin. Can’t keep up. I didn’t realize they changed the design with the B+.