Enhancement Requests

[lmoon]

Lee - I think what Lionel is looking for is a way to test the device (tablet or otherwise) to ensure it makes an appropriate alert to the pilot when a threat  becomes an alarm of one type or another. Its quite tricky for developers of devices that will attach to the PAW (RunwayHD, Skydemon or other eqpt) to exercise all of their code without the ability of making the PAW send out all possible PFLAU sentences.

John

HI Lee

Perhaps I should have mentioned that I live under the London TMA and get the 09 departures to Ockham VOR coming directly over the house at about 3000 ft.  All I would like to do is to be able to set the 'alert altitude' to something like 4000 ft then the PAW unit would give me $PFLAU messages with data in them.  Indecently from my upstairs room I can see traffic on the PAW unit up to 45 Km away!

Kr

Lionel

[Paul_Sengupta]

45km? From upstairs here in Guildford I can see them over Belgium and the Netherlands!

[lmoon]

Hi Lee
Thanks for that, it is indeed self explanatory.    Is there by chance a 'test' version of the PAW software which can force $PFLAU sentences with error messages?  I only as the only other option that I can see it to arrange to physically fly close to another aircraft !! (i am running version 20151219)
Kr
Lionel

There is some internal code that has this capability, but not in a form to release.
The release which will contain the PilotAware Bridge should have a tracking capability, which will record your movements, and everyting that was visible to your device, and it will have the option to save that data.
A replay could be added later

Thx
Lee

Hi Lee

It was not a tracking ability that I was inquiring about.  What I was looking for was the PAW unit to transmit $PFLAU sentences with alarm 1 ,2 or 3 and thus provide some 'real' data to test my audio device - I have done computer simulations to date. As mentioned I have EGLL traffic departing over my house and I can see from the traffic screen on the PAW that they are usually below 4000 feet and come to within 0.5Km of the house!!  What I was looking for is a doctored version of the PAW software that that 'thinks' anything below 4000 feet is a threat. The heading and distance is already taken care of (see above)

I presume that even if we have two PAW units on the same desk we would not get alert messages as there is zero velocity between the two units..

Kr Lionel

[SteveHutt]

Isn't the Alarm test issue solvable by creating the ability for users to set their own alarm thresholds?

If that table detailed a few posts earlier were the default values and there was a facility to override them if desired with a user's preferred values then testing becomes very simple. Setting very high thresholds would cause all passing traffic to trigger the alarm.,

Plenty of GPS navigation devices offer this sort of user configuration facility. I'm sure my old Garmin 296 let me configure many of the control functions like this.

Steve

[Chris7777]

Hi

Just to report that I built my PAW back in Oct 2015 and it seemed to boot ok when monitoring the HDMI output. However there is not much traffic to monitor in the wilds of Scotland so it wasn't until this last week that I installed the GPS dongle and updated the software and found that it works brilliantly picking up aircraft as far out as 100km, just from my kitchen table.

I have now disconnected the P3I Tx, as I think we are not meant to be using that at the moment?

I think a status LED to tell me that PAW is working normally would be useful and it would be great to have a display of non-ADS-B traffic which appear on the traffic.cgi page, superimposed on the SD like the attached photo.

Well done the PAW team.

Many thanks for developing an interesting and I hope, useful project.

Chris

[SteveN]

I guess two or more aircraft sat on the ramp together will get a choice of PAW to connect to.

Might be an idea to append  the Wifi hotspot with  PAWs flightID entry (e.g. reg).

eg: "Pilotaware-B999XXXYYYY - G-ABCD"

Not a fan of encryption as a solution in this instance as people also fly in other peoples aircraft.

[the_doc]

Any chance of making the Ethernet IP address manually configurable or DHCP compliant?

My Classic is set at 192.168.0.100 - believe it or not (don't ask!) I have devices around that range and a printer whose IP is identical I really don't want to change without causing a major headache!

I would have thought it better to set this to use DHCP (if Pi does such a thing?) as every owner's network will be quite different and this might of course be an issue in update problems that could be avoided, saving you from possible support requests?

Great idea, Ethernet enabled updates- 

[Admin]

Any chance of making the Ethernet IP address manually configurable or DHCP compliant?

My Classic is set at 192.168.0.100 - believe it or not (don't ask!) I have devices around that range and a printer whose IP is identical I really don't want to change without causing a major headache!

I would have thought it better to set this to use DHCP (if Pi does such a thing?) as every owner's network will be quite different and this might of course be an issue in update problems that could be avoided, saving you from possible support requests?

Great idea, Ethernet enabled updates- 

Hi
Actually it does use DHCP if your subnet is NOT 192.168.0.xxx
This was for ease of test development, so when I plug into my netwok it is always the same IP 

Its a valid point, and probably should be added in the future
I have had similar thoughts on ssid name, and encryption key

Thx
Lee

[the_doc]

Thanks Lee. That's great news. (My temporary fix is to run a second router set to a subnet other than 192.168.0.* for now then!)

[peteD]

Block ground vehicles please!

Pete wrote:

However at my airfield I found several unknown Hex codes on the traffic page and displaying on my SkyDemon aircraft symbol.

Looking at the traffic page I believe they are ground vehicles as they are equipped with transponders.(reverse hex code lookups showed "unknown").

So is there any way of filtering out these known hex codes, i.e. I like to be able to enter more than one code into Hex-ID?

Lee wrote:

as you have quite correctly worked out, the HEX-ID field is for your own transponder ICAO, this simply stops PilotAware using either your Mode-S or Mode-S/ES(ADSB) from your own transponder.

Unfortunately there is no way to filter other objects, other than relative height difference in your Nav tool settings.
So the ground items could be filtered once in the air at a relative height greater than your filter.

Interestingly, I recall that ground vehicles have a setting in the DF strings which indicate it is a ground setting, so there is the potential to filter out ALL ground vehicles, could I ask you to add this onto the enhancement requests ?

Please can we filter out ground vehicles/traffic?
Thanks
Pete

[gilest]

Not sure if this has already been discussed but it would be great to have a simulator mode - useful for setting up and testing. Have just purchased and setup my unit but would like to adjust volume of warnings from PAW and to see how both ADSB, PAW and Mode S contacts and warnings appear on my Runway HD.

[Admin]

Not sure if this has already been discussed but it would be great to have a simulator mode - useful for setting up and testing. Have just purchased and setup my unit but would like to adjust volume of warnings from PAW and to see how both ADSB, PAW and Mode S contacts and warnings appear on my Runway HD.

Yes this is an interesting concept, we could probably just add a replay feature of a pre-recorded flight.
This could then be selected on a repeat loop in the web interface.
Good idea!

[SteveN]

Not sure how feasible it would be but an alternative/addition to using the PI jack for traffic warnings might be to send them over Wifi to the tablet. The tablet then announces all the warnings.

Play store already appears to have a free app to do this.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vnd.wifiaudio&hl=en

Cooperation from Skydemon etc would of course mean no need for a second app.

[Richard]

Would it be possible to update our PAW via one of the USB slots by using a USB Dongle? This will allow a PAW to be fixed within an aircraft with an extension USB from it. ( where a GPS on an extension )

[Richard]

Sound alerts are fantastic, I really like it.. Just one thing, at a busy airfield on taxi and takeoff it can be very distracting as you are been warned about traffic in patients around the airfield. Would is be possible to select traffic below, say, 1200feet and you already have above traffic already selectable

Thank you

Edit...... May be to filter out traffic below 500 ft would be better!!