FlightAware - PiAware - SkyAware

I'm about to have (yet another) week off... I'm allowed, I literally was recorded as being utilised 100.1% last year, that's AFTER deductions of holiday days, etc...etc... (most people struggle to get 50-60%) and well, then being treated like sh!t by my employer by not recognising my efforts, but happy to take their rewards ([no surprise] I pi$$ed off a higher up a few years back & they just won't let their d!ck swinging ego, move on... ho! hum!), so, I've now got to take off one week per month, until April otherwise I lose the holiday days.  Fine by me.  But, oh, what to do?

Well.....you may recall that a while back, maybe mid-last year, I wrote an ARTICLE HERE about using an SDR (Software Defined Radio) USB dongle for listening to the radio waves around us... and then I purchased a Flightaware USB stick and antenna.  I had a little play around with it.  I proved it could capture commercial flight data in a 100-or so mile radius from the antenna, save that data and replay it back using whatever tool that I wanted, I chose the awesome node-red worldmap.

So, it was a session of first deciding what I was going to install the software onto, how I was going to do that and whether I was going to make this a dedicated machine or not.  Previously, I had installed the dump1090 software onto a Raspberry Pi and had captured the data either to a file or via telnet to port 30003 for streaming the data live.... Then I had a thought, why don't I actually, for once, do something like "other people do" and do it the "easy way", rather than always having to go through life the "hard way" (funny, in ref. to the comments at the start - I do find it difficult to be a 'sheep', I guess I just never believed enough in Jus Asaf)

Easy way = go to Flightaware website, find PiAware, download it (unzip it first!), then burn it to an SD-Card.  I believe I was meant to tweak the piaware-config.txt file at this point, but I forgot and did it after the event.

Visit HERE:

watch this video

It's pretty simple, plug the FlightAware USB dongle into the RPi, connect the antenna, just for visibility plug the RPi into a monitor - you'll see the PiAware 8.2 splash screen appear and the very basic text telling you what version it's running, what it has detected hardware wise and whether it has an IP Address or not.  The last part is important!  On initial start-up you'll also NOT have an associated FlightAware account so that will be missing.

As it says in the "advanced" webpage HERE - you can edit the /boot/piaware-config.txt file AFTER the event (like I did), just select to drop out to the CLI, enter the default credentials pi/flightaware and then sudo /boot/piaware-config.txt and make the changes to the wireless details, yes, it's in plain text, but y'know...

Note: do NOT run $ sudo raspi-config and configure for the wifi - whilst it "will work", it won't persist after a restart - you need to use the piaware-config.txt file changes.  You can guess how I learnt that ;-)

If you access the RPi4 IP address directly (after the Claim thing) you get this page appear:

The [SkyAware Map] is what you see in images below, it's showing you the flight data you are currently obtaining from the antenna.  If you click on the [stats] link that then takes you to the FlightAware website, where you can, well, see stats!  The chart on the right, most likely be in a different position for you as I moved it, shows how the extended antenna is helping to pick up aircraft up to 200 miles away - that is awesome.  As I say, when I first set this up, leaning the antenna against a double-glazed window I was only getting data in the first column, ie <50miles!

I'm actually using an RPi 5 with dual HDMI outputs (bottom device), one mini-HDMI output goes to the KVM that outputs onto a nice big-ish SONY monitor as output and the other mini-HDMI output goes to a VGA converter that outputs to a 15" old monitor just dedicated to show the web-page output

I thought I would run a "test" and setup the antenna, in the middle of this image, outside - it makes a HUGE difference just being the otherside of a double-glazed window, it really does!  The antenna on the right hand side is for the Meshtastic device that is running outside connected to a Heltec3 device (offgrid comms for the end of the world - lol )

With this setup - and doing the FlightAware claim ID thing - that did take a few hours and I found that a Chromium web-browser just did not work, but a Firefox one worked fine - interesting.  Then the device and FlightAware were now in-sync.

A quick check on the monitor showed, we have data. woo!hoo!

Albeit it was "good", but I was pretty sure we could get "better"....

So I got the ladder out and some cable-ties......and a broken broom handle, it was only about a 2-foot increase in height, but....did it make any data difference?

If you compare the flights shown in the image above with this new image, you can see, I can reach out to Birmingham and out to Essex and if I zoom out, right down into France too... so MUCH better!

Of course, I couldn't just "let it lie" with using FlightAware, of course I had to get a node-red flow running that takes the streaming data and outputs it using the worldmap dashboard UI:

This means that I actually have access to the "same data", but I can modify / change the UI etc.. to match my preferences, I do actually like the ability to colour-code the aircraft based upon the height, that is a really cool indicator, I also have more freedom (thanks Dave!) to have different icons, but also range-rings around aircraft, so I have the potential to have a nice blur of the best of FlightAware and my own concoction.

I actually also like the fact that I am gathering data for FlightAware and adding to the wider audience of users - maybe not quite so keen that FlightAware are actually "selling that data" to other people / businesses - but I suppose they have to make money somehow, they've got servers to keep running, people to system admin everything, storage costs, etc..etc... so it is fair in this case.

Oh, as the above maps are just internal IP address URLs, of course I can then access them on any other devices too, such as my phone, here's the node-red output rendering pretty well:

"That's lovely Tony, but where is the AI?"

hahahhahahaa... y'know, not everything has to have the latest buzzword associated to it.  Think more like a Consultant & less like a sales person.  The question you should ask is, "Does it NEED AI? and if so, WHERE would it be best put to use?"

Taking that one step further, FlightAware are receiving all of that time-series flight data, storing it, using a UI to present it and then selling access to that massive data lake of data via APIs.  What are people using those APIs for?  That is the real question.

I can actually do the same, as I said in my original article in July last year, you don't need to use PiAware, you can just run dump1090 and get the raw data, formatted nicely, from an RPi and store it within an InFlux database (or other of your choice), once it is there, you can perform analysis on that data - or you could look for anomalies, ie. more air traffic or less air traffic in a specific region.

You could even hook into the Met data website content and look at weather data, see how that impacts flights.

You could even look into the Solar flare analysis websites and look into the predicted and current solar flares / storms that are erupting and either predict or analyse the impact of communications of aircraft in specific regions, ie. if a solar storm hits the Earth in a specific region, you WILL get a comms. black out of aircraft over a certain altitude, from the data you could detect this and also not put in the red flashing panic light bulb because 100 flights just "went dark", lack of GPS, RF etc...

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aviation-community-dashboard

No AI, but analysis of data in order to relieve cognitive burden or to assist with other tasks, so maybe it is "Assistive Intelligence", certainly not Artificial Intelligence - that does not exist and likely never will in our life time - pull up a chair & let's discuss that statement in more detail..... you can now see how / why I pi$$ off sales people, that's not the snake oil that they are peddling and wanting me to do so too.

All that's left to do is to enjoy the moving dots on a screen out the corner of my eye, just for SA, nothing more.  For me, it's just "moving art"......