I started storing all of the JSON data that I got into an aircraft.json file, where I wrote a simple python program to remove any rows and json data that didn’t include the coordinates (latitude and longitude). This project was done in Ubuntu because dump1090 primarily works really well in Ubuntu. Running it on a MacOS or Windows device will cause you to install WSL or something similar just to be able to access and run it properly.

Ubuntu also has a good USB handling capability that is better than Windows or any other device. It handles the device and can read it better, which is needed for the constant connection from the antenna for my final app. One of the challenges I faced with the device was also the routine loss of connectivity that happened due to the overheating of the device. I then turned on a neck fan and placed it around the device to stay cool, which actually started working really well.

Once that issue was sorted, I wanted to get the data from my data folder to the actual azure database. Due to having a student account in GitHub, I had access to a 32 MB database in azure, which I used to store all my JSON data for the flights. After running into an error of data overload, I changed my code to remove all previous data before uploading the new one in it, after a sleep time of 10 seconds. This allowed new data to be constantly updated into the database, with all the information in separate columns, and to also not take as much storage space!

I also added a simple check to skip the rows that contained a null latitude or longitude, which would not be of any help to my project. Setting up pyodbc with Azure SQL required correct connection strings, especially enabling encryption and trust server certificates. I also had to manually allow my local IP in the Azure SQL firewall. After finally doing that, my database and all data was finally ready.