Hi all,
I recently purchased Rosetta and am amazed by the possibilities.
Only, as recently shared with the tech support, I have some doubts about the architecture / suggestions on how to improve it.
First of all, I'm open to any advice or comment based on the experience of long time users. The conversation and reading the below can get quite advanced due to the sheer nature of technical details, but I'm sure there are many advanced users out there who might also benefit of this thread, other than PAW's tech support of course.
The problem - all in oneAnother pilot advised me to purchase the WiFi module to benefit of iGRID features, which I was unaware of. Having to use a separate WiFi seemed quite odd from the start, but went for it anyway: in fact, I immediately noticed that on my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S22 with the latest Android) I could not achieve all the following 4 goals simultaneously:
- stable and reliable setup
- internet connectivity
- Skydemon displaying traffic
- Rosetta connecting to iGRID
Internet connectivity seemed impossible to achieve: in the recent Android versions WiFi is disconnected automatically in case hotspot is enabled and viceversa, but anyway before if you did so you would have just shared the WiFi connection over the hotspot, as once on WiFi you bypass the mobile carrier connectivity.
Not too bad, I though initially, as using another phone or iPad I could have Skydemon and Rosetta's radar displayed in split screen... but nope, once connected to the PAW wifi, Skydemon cannot reach pilotaware, because the folks at SD hardcoded 192.168.1.1 as default target address (and seem also quite proud of this allegedly under the light of "UX simplification", by reading their forums - it's normal, companies often mistreat UX, not having the faintest clue about what cognitive ergonomics are and used as an excuse for not doing what's required).
Yes, I could fix it partially on my main device by using Speedify to obtain both Internet connectivity and PAW, but still I would not have access to IGRID. As said, not all goals can be achieved simultaneously, apparently .
Portable hotspotSo, I decided to use a portable hotspot I already had with a dedicated SIM card (necessary anyway when outside Europe), only to find out that 99.9% of portable hotspots don't allow DHCP reservation, hence it was impossible to assign 192.168.1.1 to satisfy SD's weirdness. The setup worked so and so, anyway, but sadly the devices should not connect to the hotspot directly, which is supposed to be the center of the network, but to PAW wifi, which then reroutes to the hotspot (I get the shivers only by writing this). 3 goals were achieved, but stability... very poor, the wifi interfaces cyclically resetting (as visibile on the home screen), and anyway all mobile devices had to be prevented for connecting to the hotspot directly, when losing connectivity from paw.
Portable hotspot with Ethernet and DHCP reservationBeing goal-oriented (aka stubborn
), after some scouting I purchased a XE300 portable router which features an Ethernet port... alongside the DHCP reservation I couldn't find anywhere else in a portable router! Hoorah!
I set up XE300 for my usual SSID, password, security, etc. and reserved 192.168.1.1 for the MAC address of Rosetta's ethernet port, obviously using another static IP for the router itself to avoid conflict, could connect to rosetta via the browser on all devices, incredibly smooth, no additional USB WiFi dongle required, the flat ethernet cable passing nicely through the case tolerance, all seemed good. Until... i opened SD: connecting to device. How come? I was using split screen, I was connecting to paw.local on the browser but SD couldn't see the very same address?
Current stable setup
Well, out of frustration, I scrambled the settings and configured the router on 192.168.0.x to allow the ethernet port sit on 192.168.1.1 and benefit of the routing feature, so still mis-using Rosetta as the center of my network rather than one of its clients. Still way more stable than any other setup, still not requiring the additional WiFI radio, and I'm sticking to it for the time being, but I'm not yet satisfied. What am I missing here?
Further experiments
I got an enlightenment: perhaps the folks at SD also want to ensure I am connecting to a Rosetta, by checking the SSID? You won't believe it, seems I was right: I eventually got SD to see Rosetta, yay! Why is this not in the previous section, current stable setup? Because, for some weird reason which I haven't had yet time to figure out, this setup doesn't allow connecting the device to the Internet while accessing Rosetta via SD, or the opposite.
If this set up worked 100%, all 4 goals would be achieved, and I would also try and disable the onboard wifi, to avoid any unnecessary consumption and interference (so far I only lowered to 1mw in this setup).
Obviously this is all due to the weird constraints on the SD's side, but if anyone could take a look and give some advice on how to fix the "ultimate setup", I'd very grateful.Solution as of 26.11.23, TLDR versionInstead of banging my head with the PilotAware protocol, which apparently relies on UDP unicast (rather than multicast)... better use FLARM as suggested by Admin
Thanks PilotAware folks for supporting on this setup.
All the best