PiAware 6.1 Update and More
Happy Sunday, everybody!
It's a while since the last update (in March), and I hope you are all doing great and enjoying your flight tracking. Despite the lacking newsletter updates, the balena-ads-b project is alive and kicking. Here are some essential updates since last time:
PiAware 6.1 release
Earlier this fall, FlightAware released PiAware version 6.0 and soon after came version 6.1. balena-ads-b was updated shortly after that. In addition to the more minor fixes and improvements in this release, we find automatic gain tuning: Your receiver will now try to find the optimal antenna gain setting at your location. If you want to specify the gain manually, you can do so using the DUMP1090_GAIN
environment variable.
RadarBox 0.4.3 release
The team at RadarBox has also been busy on their software and released version 0.4.3 of their feeder a few months ago. balena-ads-b has now been upgraded to this version, which promises increased. RadarBox writes:
The new build (v0.4.3) allows your Raspberry Pi to share additional ADS-B integrity & accuracy data that enables RadarBox to better determine the reliability of position reports sent by an aircraft. The new version of the feeder software also contains various bug fixes.
Please note that no other personal or private data is collected. Updating your Raspberry Pi to this build (v0.4.3) is purely optional and voluntary, although it is strongly recommended.
ADSB Exchange update
Thanks to garethhowell from the community, ADSB Exchange-feeding was added to balena-ads-b earlier this year. Now, the ADSB Exchange implementation has been updated with more functionality like statistics and the anywhere map. Have a look at your ADSB Exchange dashboard.
How to update?
Updating is easy. If you installed balena-ads-b using the blue Deploy with balena-button, you can click it again and overwrite your current application. All settings will be preserved. You can even do it from this newsletter:
If you used the git clone
method, pull the changes from the master branch and push the update to your application with the balena CLI. For complete instructions, have a look at the ReadMe.
Living in the US?
Support for UAT feeding is now in place and is currently running at one location in the Philadelphia area. A big thanks to Alan for verifying that it works. The complete documentation about how to set this up will come later. Please get in touch if you live in the US, have an extra RTLSDR dongle, and can't wait to test this out. If you do not live in the US, there's sadly no point in setting this up. UAT is currently exclusively available in select US regions.
Video from balena's hackathon
A few weeks ago, balena hosted an online virtual IoT hackathon. I had the pleasure of participating. I also discussed the balena-ads-b project at a fireside chat with David and Alan from balena. If you missed it, you can now watch the recording on YouTube. (Combine with this video from earlier this year.)
Need help?
🚨 Raise an issue on GitHub
💬 Create a post in our forum thread
📺 Watch the videos from the balena IoT Happy Hour in March 2021 and from balena Hackathon in October 2021
📨 Reach out to me directly
That's all for this time, folks! Happy feeding!
Ketil