Stratux part deux

[Raptor05121]

I've been flying behind a Stratux ( a homemade-equivalent version of the Stratus) for about two years now, just before they were getting popular. Since then, the Raspberry Pi has released a new version, the SDRs have been upgraded multiple generations, and new things such as AHRS have been released so I retired my old unit and decided to start anew.

I mainly did a little "show and tell" for the local EAA newsletter but I thought I'd share here, too. I've got a Samsung Tab A, utilizing DroidEFB. I like to think of it as a "Lite" version of Foreflight, with most of the cool features, W&B, E6B, flightplan export, IFR approach plates with live tracking, etc etc etc.

 

 

 

 

I'm not an Apple/Foreflight fanboy, and as presiding cabinet member of the CB club, it does me well for most of my flying.

Stratux- $155
Tablet- $230
RAM Mount Setup- $75
DroidEFB- $70/yr

 

Photo taken on the way to the Mooney Summit:

 

[Bartman]

Wow that's awesome.  You have skills, knowledge, and communication abilities.  I nominate you for President of the CB club !

[midlifeflyer]

Great explanation. In my case, I was also an early user, but mostly because I like to tinker. I still used a Stratus/ForeFlight combo. 

With all the hardware updates, though, this past year I decided to upgrade most of the innards, although keeping my Pi2, and added the case. I was so pleased with the result I sold my Stratus.

[Raptor05121]

I've had people message me about the parts, so here's some more info:

There are three ways you can build one of these. First and easiest is you can buy one completely assembled, with a small markup from a number of shops online. Some have batteries, antennas, etc all ready to go. Just turn it on and fly. Just a matter of googling around. Here are two quick search results-

https://www.amazon.com/Stratux-Receiver-Aviation-Weather-Traffic/dp/B071HMQY19/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_23_tr_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=GXGXYKMA8YFQ7KZGVVK3

$250

https://www.everlastconcepts.com/products/stratux-dual-band-ads-b-and-weather-receiver-with-wass-gps-and-power-pack

$230

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The second way to get going with one of these is to buy a "kit" where it sends you all you need. This cuts down on the expense, but you'll have to assemble it all. I promise you, its not hard. There are a lot of videos on Youtube detailing them together. One of the members behind the Stratux dev team created a shop on Amazon where you can get most of the parts. This is the link to the Stratux store, which has everything you'll need. If you follow the build kit (found at www.stratux.me) it'll tell you what you need. The SD card kit will come preloaded, and the radios will come pre-assigned to their appropriate frequencies.

https://www.amazon.com/Stratux/b/ref=bl_dp_s_web_14826845011?ie=UTF8&node=14826845011&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Stratux

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The downside to this approach is that you wont have the latest stuff, which is why I went with option 3- select each component separately, and build it ad-hoc. I picked the latest SDRs which some sellers have from different stores, I chose the splitter exactly for my arrangement from a cable shop, I picked a SD card that I liked best, etc etc etc. Its the most flexible, but does require manual programming of the SDRs to tell them to listen to specific frequencies, which adds complexity, plus you need to download the latest Stratux file and manually write to the SD card. If you choose this route, there are guides on how to do programing, so again, no hard but it takes about 1.5hrs from start to finish. The upside is it will be future proof as the Nano 3 radios I've chosen are newly releases while the Nano 2s still found on the Stratux store are over a year old, but still viable.

[Raptor05121]

15 minutes ago, midlifeflyer said:

Great explanation. In my case, I was also an early user, but mostly because I like to tinker. I still used a Stratus/ForeFlight combo. 

With all the hardware updates, though, this past year I decided to upgrade most of the innards, although keeping my Pi2, and added the case. I was so pleased with the result I sold my Stratus.

The Pi3 is truly a smart upgrade to the 2. The processor is faster, as well as the built-in WiFi versus a USB unit. Boot-up and connect time has dropped about 40% versus my old Pi2 with WiFi dongle. I'm very pleased with my upgrade. And yeah, I could not fathom spending $800 for a Stratus

[MARZ]

Cool - will that hook to foreflight?

[neilpilot]

In 2015 I built a stratux, with P2 and a basic case.  With cords to the antenna and battery, the unit worked but was somewhat unwieldy. 

Recently I considered an upgrade, but decided that a new Merlin from Seattle Avionics at their Black Friday price of $200 was a much more elegant solution.

 

[Raptor05121]

49 minutes ago, Mike Ropers said:

Cool - will that hook to foreflight?

It will, but I have heard the AHRS is disabled, they want you to buy Stratus. You can used a backdoor method to bypass it, but I'm not familiar with it

[N6758N]

2 hours ago, Raptor05121 said:

The downside to this approach is that you wont have the latest stuff, which is why I went with option 3- select each component separately, and build it ad-hoc. 

I just built one using this method as well. It was a little more work in the programming department, but I saved like $15 over buying the components that the stratux.me website wants you to buy. I went with the clear case with dual fans and removed the USB plug from the one fan and soldered both fans to the AHRS chip (it has a fan sensor/controller built in). Worked perfectly after reformatting my SD card 3 different times in order to get the software to boot up. My only disappointment is the battery I chose (6000 mah) doesn't seem to last nearly as long as my stratus 2. 

[Raptor05121]

I just have a USB charger plugged in the DC power port of the airplane. Comes on with the master

[DonMuncy]

I built my Stratux  a couple of years ago. Does anyone know whether it will fit in the plastic cases with the built in fan.

[N6758N]

3 minutes ago, DonMuncy said:

I built my Stratux  a couple of years ago. Does anyone know whether it will fit in the plastic cases with the built in fan.

There are 2 different style cases Don, one fits with the AHRS chip, one does not. So they say.

[midlifeflyer]

2 hours ago, Raptor05121 said:

The Pi3 is truly a smart upgrade to the 2. The processor is faster, as well as the built-in WiFi versus a USB unit. Boot-up and connect time has dropped about 40% versus my old Pi2 with WiFi dongle. I'm very pleased with my upgrade. And yeah, I could not fathom spending $800 for a Stratus

So far, I see no problems with my P2. It boots up and is running in much less than a minute. I figure I'll wait a few iterations. After all, if I updated the hardware every time a new, better one came out, I'd be paying for a commercial product.

[midlifeflyer]

25 minutes ago, DonMuncy said:

I built my Stratux  a couple of years ago. Does anyone know whether it will fit in the plastic cases with the built in fan.

It depends. Your biggest issue is your SDRs. If your vintage is the same as the ones I replaced, they are significantly larger than the newer ones. The good cases out the are designed for the newer and smaller ones.

[EricJ]

3 hours ago, Raptor05121 said:

I just have a USB charger plugged in the DC power port of the airplane. Comes on with the master

I was doing that but had a couple instances of the Flash card in the Pi3 getting corrupted, presumably during a power cycle.   If the power chatters at all due to bounce in  the power relay or other reasons, that's not surprising.   Now I have the stratux plugged into a USB battery and that battery plugged into the USB charger on ship's power.   That also lets me power the stratux up first so that it's booted and the tablets can get connected before I even start the airplane.   Haven't had any flash corruption problems since I started doing it this way, and if I have to interrupt power to the stratux for any reason the battery will keep it alive.   I also now carry a spare preloaded flash card for the stratux just in case it does do it again.

[Raptor05121]

Interesting point. I've had the same problem, but I was using a no-name Chinese 4 or 8GB card. I've figured it was either because of cheap card OR the page file was filling up and corrupting the card, so this time I bought a SanDisk Ultra 16GB and allocated the Raspberry partition to use all of it. Hopefully killing two birds with one stone.

[Steve W]

1 hour ago, EricJ said:

I was doing that but had a couple instances of the Flash card in the Pi3 getting corrupted, presumably during a power cycle. 

I haven't looked at the Stratux code, but at the end of the day you're running a tiny Unix system. They've never been friendly to having the power yanked without being shut down properly. And from what I've heard some MicroSD cards do not take kindly to loss of power during a write(even worse than traditional disks/ssds). Ideally Stratux should make the whole card read-only unless you're actually updating a setting which should make it safe for unexpected shutdowns in most cases. But a battery(flying UPS) and a high quality card and backup card should definitely improve reliability.

 

[midlifeflyer]

6 minutes ago, Steve W said:

I haven't looked at the Stratux code, but at the end of the day you're running a tiny Unix system. They've never been friendly to having the power yanked without being shut down properly. And from what I've heard some MicroSD cards do not take kindly to loss of power during a write(even worse than traditional disks/ssds). Ideally Stratux should make the whole card read-only unless you're actually updating a setting which should make it safe for unexpected shutdowns in most cases. But a battery(flying UPS) and a high quality card and backup card should definitely improve reliability.

 

The Stratux also logs information, which is a major part of the SD corruption problem. There is programming you can do to make it read-only. Or, you can put a shutdown link on your home page and add that to your shutdown checklist.

[EricJ]

1 hour ago, Steve W said:

I haven't looked at the Stratux code, but at the end of the day you're running a tiny Unix system. They've never been friendly to having the power yanked without being shut down properly. And from what I've heard some MicroSD cards do not take kindly to loss of power during a write(even worse than traditional disks/ssds). Ideally Stratux should make the whole card read-only unless you're actually updating a setting which should make it safe for unexpected shutdowns in most cases. But a battery(flying UPS) and a high quality card and backup card should definitely improve reliability.

 

Yeah, it's just an app running on a Linux distro, and Pi3s have multi-core CPUs, so there's no telling what's running at any given time or what they're doing (reading, writing, whatever).   There is no other non-volatile memory on a Pi3, so if the stratux app or any part of the system wants to save anything, it'll want to write to the flash.   Plus, like you say, most inexpensive embedded systems aren't very tolerant of power drop outs, so it's not surprising to me that it has issues with power transients.  So far I haven't had an issue with it when it is connected to the battery, but we'll see if that continues or not.

[peevee]

Do yourself a favor and pony up for the ping efb. Uses less lower and has better reception

[EricJ]

13 minutes ago, peevee said:

Do yourself a favor and pony up for the ping efb. Uses less lower and has better reception

Is there a place to buy them?   They've been "currently unavailable" on Amazon for a long time.

[peevee]

10 hours ago, EricJ said:

Is there a place to buy them?   They've been "currently unavailable" on Amazon for a long time.

got ours on amazon, I didn't know they were OOS

[Raptor05121]

14 hours ago, peevee said:

Do yourself a favor and pony up for the ping efb. Uses less lower and has better reception

 

Who cares about less power? Its a 70A alternator. I have AHRS + GPS + dual-band in for the same price.

And I guarantee I get better reception than the Ping

[peevee]

34 minutes ago, Raptor05121 said:

 

Who cares about less power? Its a 70A alternator. I have AHRS + GPS + dual-band in for the same price.

And I guarantee I get better reception than the Ping

 

 

you... understand there's a limit on how much power the PI board can supply, right? Not to mention the USB cable itself? And I guarantee you don't. I've tested it.

[Raptor05121]

I don't recall you coming and flying my airplane. The laws of physics don't bend for Ping. The little tiny antenna it has is no match for my setup.