Weatherflow PiConsole on a shared Pi (PiAware)

Can anyone tell me if it possible to run dump1090 for FlightAware on the same Pi as the PiConsole?

  1. Pi’s are cheap, and multiply like rabbits at my house dedicated to one app each.

  2. The USB SDR dongle to run dump1090 needs a large amount of CPU cycles on the Pi, and you should feel how hot some of my SDR dongles get running 24/7.

This is interesting. Do you know if the dongles exhibit a constant high level usage of CPU cycles, or whether the usage increases and decreases over time? I am wondering if this may be the cause of the sporadic PiConsole lockups seen by the user over on Github?

My dump1090 Pi took a dump shortly after the loss of YANKY 72, and I never rebuilt it because I lost interest in tracking the local airport traffic after that. So, I can’t check the CPU load on a live system for you. I was running it on an original Pi B+ at one point, and it definitely dogged out the CPU.

My understanding of the SDR architecture is that it dumps a raw data stream onto the host CPU, which needs to make sense of it through DSP and higher-level protocol decoding. Given the heat generated by the newer Pi’s in video streaming uses, I would not rule out heat-related crashes running the SDR on a newer Pi without a decent heat sink or active fan cooling.

My personal rule is one Pi, one app. Makes maintenance of each app easier in the long run…

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@peter won’t it better to split this topic for the fr24 adding ?? Might become confusing …
Here are graphs of my pi3 running flightaware sending to +/- 5 different trackers and as you can see traffic is near non existing these days but cpu usage and ram usage hardly change with or without traffic.
Nothing else on that pi running.




Thanks for this @eric. Very happy to split the topics to keep things simple. If CPU/mem usage is pretty constant, I still don’t get why someone is seeing the Pi console lock up…

The answer is always yes, as long as the two things don’t use the same peripherals or tcp/ip port

How great an experience it is of course depends on how new/powerful your pi is. If you want to run a lot of stuff on an old model-B, perhaps not so pleasant an experience. If you want to run the same two things on a 4GB RAM pi4 with a super-fast SD, far more likely a bet.

Thanks everyone for the info. With extra time on my hands was thinking about something else to fiddle with with the least amount of expense. With the lack of income now I’ll just have to pass on outfitting a new Pi at this point.