I love planes. And one service I really like is Flightradar24, as it shows you live where planes are. I’ve been contributing data to them for a while now with a raspberry pi. But a few days ago, I got this email.
This isn’t good. My first thought was to reboot the pi, and that worked. For a few hours. Then I got that email again… Great.
An Upgrade
So, it looks like the micro SD card died. I could just put a new one in, and reinstall things. Or I could upgrade to a better everything. Luckily, I had a spare pi 5 with an NVMe drive sitting around. Perfect.
Reinstalling things was less fun than it should have been. I started by installing the latest PiOS version, but the Flightradar24 package wouldn’t talk to the SDR1. So, I installed Flightradar24’s pi image. That worked, but started having issues when installing updates. So I ended up installing an older version of PiOS2, and setting up the Flightradar24 package. That worked, and didn’t break when installing updates. Perfect.
I pretty sure that the issues I was having with the latest PiOS, was with Debian Trixie. As both the Flightradar24 image, and the older PiOS version are based in Debian Bookworm. But, in the end, my feeder station is back up and running.
The SSD should last way longer than the micro SD card, as I don’t really want to get that email again. Hosting a receiver is what let’s me use Flightradar24’s top tier plan for free… Maybe I should deploy another one somewhere.