News items for tag wardrivingbox - Koos van den Hout

On Sunday we went on a nice bicycle tour. A bit over 80 kilometers. I brought the wardriving box along and logged the networks found and the gps track. But now I can do something really cool: I can plot the track on a map and put the results on-line thanks to OpenStreetMap. No hassle with 'illegal' map material. This makes this a great moment in open license map data for me. Steps to use an OSM export map in gpsmap (part of kismet). I added the line about the license for the openstreetmap data myself but I can imagine importing data from openstreetmap and correctly naming the source turning into a standard option in gpsmap.

I measured the power usage of the wardriving box. It uses a nice 420 mA. That is very nice, given that the alix.1c board, the wireless card and the gps receiver are all powered from this. In theory, this means the 2.2 Ah battery should be able to power it for over 5 hours.

Wardriving results 28 March - 16 April: 2853 new networks with GPS locations noted at WiGLE. Most amazing was finding 505 new networks without moving the wardriving box one centimeter: the AMD_IBSS networks were showing up again when I had the wardriving box running overnight in the top window.

Wardriving results 24 Februari - 3 March: 4377 new networks with GPS locations. The wardriving box is helping, together with having nice weather and time for long bicycle rides around Utrecht. I passed the 90000 new networks mark at WiGLE and I'm back at position 22 in the WiGLE stats.

Real test of the wardriving box yesterday: I brought it along on my recumbent bike on a 38 kilometer biking trip. With the big antenna on a piece of metal on the rack of the recumbent bicycle. Worked great and found 1354 new networks with GPS locations.

The wardriving box is finished and I have done the first test today. And scored new networks! Between 13 Februari and 23 Februari I found 184 new networks with GPS locations. Of those 108 using the laptop on bicycle, 63 in the first testrun using the wardrivebox on bicycle and 13 from testing the wardrive box at home. Yes, I can still find new networks at home without moving.

I left the wardriving box running overnight to test the stability and heat generation. No problems in those areas. It was on the top floor of the house in the window facing northwest (in the direction of the student flats). A total of 43(!) access-points were seen. Yes, wireless networks are still rising in numbers.

I had some time for work on the wardriving box. I fixed the powerbutton problem by switching to Linux kernel 2.6.24.2. Linux 2.6 has specific support for the geode processor which include acpi support. With 2.6 I get a good power-button event when I press it and on a shutdown with powerdown the alix system is powered down completely (power led goes out). I also worked on the case, making holes for the antenna connectors. I managed to make the right holes and modify the I/O shield without making the wrong holes or get damaged myself. My teacher in metalwork years ago would probably think I'm still bad at it but with a drill and a metal file the modifications got done, including filing the flange of the N-connector to make it fit in the case. Pictures of the results,

Results of the metalwork.

Antenna connectors in place and the I/O shield modified to allow for the big N-connector.

Board installed in the case.

I'm also learning about Linux 2.6: without a keyboard there is not a lot of entropy for /dev/random.

The battery (and the charger) for the wardriver box arrived. Even with the room number and the department missing from the address label the internal mail still managed to deliver it to my desk.

A few minor setbacks on the wardriving box project yesterday evening. Software shutdown via acpid does not work (there is no event when I press the power button). Kernel recompiling for acpi debugging gave me lots of headaches with the module versioning. I did some searching for it and the Linux Loadable Kernel Module HOWTO had the answer:

So it is generally not wise to use symbol versioning

.. words to the wise. And the CF connector of the M200 case is a normal 40 pin IDE connector where I bought a cable for 44pin 2mm ide connectors because the alix.1c mainboard has a 44pin ide header. It would be nice if I could fix this, I could use the external CF-bay of the M200 case which would mean I wouldn't have to open it to change/upgrade the CF. The manual of the M200 case has stern warnings about opening and closing it too often.

Wardriving results between 12 January and 12 February 2008: 1321 new networks with GPS location. Since the work on the wardriving box software and hardware the GPS and the antenna have been at home for testing it all.. and I did not feel like bringing the stuff along and getting another run with problems. I ordered the battery and a charger yesterday and did some more test runs, some with the external antenna connected. The big external antenna gives me 23 visible networks at home. Work that is left on the wardriving box: cabling, making holes in the case for antenna and power connections and building it all together.

First network scanned with the wardriving box uploaded to WiGLE. Not a new network (my own), but a valid upload anyway. Now for the final automation bit: starting kismet at the end of the boot process with the right drivers and settings. And the hardware bits: power and antenna connectors on the case and a battery (and charger) to power it all when not on my desk. And making sure it can all be brought along on the bicycle or in a car.

A fellow wardriver asked for a picture of the new wardriving box which is still awaiting serious hardware work, but the software is mostly up and running.

The wardriving box with notes about the different parts

First boot on the wardriving box (like first light on a telescope). Thursday evening I had some actual time to play with the mainboard and a CF card. With a lot of peeking at the presentation on building flash-based Linux routers by Remco van Mook I was able to get a basic Debian Linux to run on the Alix board in little time. It boots, it starts a few getty processes and ifplugd. I also automated work on converting the local installation to a root image and the root image to the CF card.

The hardware I ordered for the wardrive box arrived yesterday. Now to find time to start playing with the enclosure, finding the right spot for the antenna connectors, doing the drilling for that, building it all together and after that working on the software. The manual for the enclosure starts with telling you need to take time to understand what needs to be done because you can only open and close the enclosure so many times.

I did it: Another wardrive with partly missing GPS locations because of a GPS problem Thursday was the reason I needed to start ordering parts for the wardriving box. So I clicked an order together at LinITX.com for the hardware.

Another instance of me thinking so seriously about a project that I started a webpage about what I want to do and how and collecting the knowledge and ideas that I already have: building a wardriving box. I first thought of a small PC for project sundial, the self-powered weather station and gps time receiver but I got the idea that this could also make a really nice Wardriving box which would do just that.