War driving contest

A place to talk about wardriving
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Post by arizonajon »

All you wardriving-types out there - this is a good reason why you should upload!
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Thanks again to Phil and Andrew for building such an easy-to-use and fun tool!

Special cheers today (going to be at least 85F/30C here) - Jon N7UV
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Post by ACalcutt »

Good to see everything arrived safely. Now you can celebrate 1,000,000+ in style :-). We are at 1,122,919 APs at this time, and I see you have more coming as we speak.

I think I fixed the issue with the images. they look great!


Enjoy the weather there. Here we are only at 17F right now and they are saying -16 tonight. 17F isn't to bad but I won't be outside tonight...
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Post by arizonajon »

Man, that's chilly. Was in northern IL this past two weeks and each time it was in the teens during the night, but at least it warmed up during the day!
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Post by pferland »

Ehhh 15 isn't bad after a few rum and comes. I spent about 2 hrs outside last night looking at Jupiter and his moo,s through my telescope.
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Post by arizonajon »

Very nice brown ale! Thanks again!
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Post by arizonajon »

Not exactly on topic, but how large a 'scope?
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Post by pferland »

130mm x 900mm Orion SpaceProbe. I have had it for close to 5 years and only just now got around to perfectly aligning the mirrors. The 25x100 binoculars I got at the beginning of the year are pretty nice also. Want to get a few more eye pieces, I only have the stock 10mm and 25mm ones that came with the scope.

Glad you like the beer. Was told they had decent beer and wanted to try it myself also. Figured you would enjoy a local brew from excursions you go on and trying the local brews there.

-Phil
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Post by arizonajon »

Electronic drive? Remote-view camera? Inquiring minds need to know.
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Post by arizonajon »

And yes, your local brews are greatly appreciated by us out here in the desert!
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Post by pferland »

No electronics, all manual tracking. No camera yet, want to get some more experience with the scope before I get any further into it. I do want to build an observatory in my back yard once I but a house. But I'm thinking that is going to take a while. I would like it to make it all remote and would like to make my own software to control it, but that's really ambitious. Lol
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Post by arizonajon »

it is wet and kinda miserable here in New Jersey. The good things are the AA pilots landed that bird at Newark in near zero-zero without a bump, and the runways were pretty sticky (except for a slick patch or two). I thought about bringing out the wardriving kit, but didn't. I did find a fine brewery called Brix City, and Joe the proprietor sampled me some nice stuff that's not yet tapped.

I will bring out the wardriving kit manana, hopefully the weather's better.

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by pferland »

Nice, its snowy up here, but they are saying that its going to be in the 50's tomorrow.
I am inching closer to being able to release v1.0 of the WiFiDB Uploader. Taking a tad longer than I expected, but its moving along well.

Hope to have a version up before your leave the NJ area to give it a test.

-Phil
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Post by arizonajon »

My sojourn to LA for the weekend really netted a lot of APs. I also got to visit Red Car Brewery, Smog City Brewing, Phantom Carriage Brewery, and Three Weavers Brewing. All of these really are quite nice...
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Post by ACalcutt »

Sounds like a good trip :-)
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Post by marco »

Jon, you ought to post mileage with your AP collection.

craig
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Post by arizonajon »

Hi Craig -

That's a good idea, as I'd like to have a better sense myself of APs per mile or kilometer. SInce each log file uploaded to WiFiDB has a set of GPS lat/lon coordinates, it should be a straightforward thing for the DB to also calculate a decent estimate of the total distance traveled and determine an average value. Since it's not my DB, this would be a job for Phil and Andrew! :D :D :D

My guesstimate is that in a typical moderate-density (Phoenix) urban/suburban area, with my particular setup, I can collect between 100-200 APs per mile, at posted speeds. It has as much to do with the WI-Fi antenna type, quality and placement, and the sensitivity and speed of the Wi-Fi dongle used, as anything else. Since Vistumbler uses the built-in Windows netsh command, it also has something to do with the performance of that command.

The logfiles for long drives through the desert, where there's only a few APs per mile generally recorded, will bias the estimate down a bit.
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In any event, I suspect that I've put an extra few thousand miles on the truck just doing AP drives. If you look at my catalog on Google Earth

https://live.wifidb.net/wifidb/api/expo ... arizonajon

You'll see that there was a bunch of trips back and forth through neighborhoods and across whole cities here in the greater PHX area where it appeared obvious that all I was doing was collecting APs. However, I do like to see different areas of town, and so I look at some of this travel as educational :)

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by arizonajon »

In fact, the loneliest stretch of highway I've been on so far is I10 east of Indio CA.
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Many of the APs collected between Cactus City and Chiriaco Summit are iPhones, Galaxys, and car hotspots. But even there you can see that there wasn't a lot of traffic.

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by arizonajon »

Here's photos of my wardrive setup.

This is the Cisco dual-band omni antenna on a mag-mount atop the truck. There's about 5' of LMR-240 coax running from the mount into the truck where the dual band wi-fi dongle is. By the way, the GPS active antenna is in the black base of the antenna to the far left in the picture. The GPS receiver itself is inside the truck. It's a uBlox (forget which model) but has both USB and serial output.
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This is the Amped Wireless dual-band wi-fi dongle with the coax connected from the antenna on the roof. The PC is a run-of-the-mill dual-core Atom with Win7Pro.
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Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by pferland »

That is really nice. I have been wanting to put a PC in my car for some time. But then android tablets came out and I figured that would be less intrusive of a build in a car and also be low power. The down side is I have not found too many good Wireless cards/Antennas that work well as an device on android. So the thought of putting a lower PC in the car keeps cropping back up.

I love the solar panels on the roof of the truck. Do you have extra batteries in the truck or does it just charge the trucks battery?
Either way, love the setup.

-Phil
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Post by arizonajon »

Thanks for the compliment, Phil.

The solar panel charges the both batteries in the truck. The second battery is the main one to run my gear, and can be isolated from the main.

The PCs available nowadays are awesome. Have you seen

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Produc ... 93&LanID=0

This is a full Windows-supporting box that's scarcely bigger than 4 iPhones stacked up. Power consumption is 15 watts typical and near zero in standby. A buddy of mine has one of these and it is just incredible. It runs directly off 12 VDC but am not sure if it would like the variability of the car voltage - I'd put a DC-DC converter in front of it

http://www.ebay.com/itm/150W-DC-DC-Boos ... xy86RSX-g5

and that way I'd have dead-stable 12 vdc.

Wire the thing to go into sleep or standby when you leave the car ignition off for some period of time and you'd never have to worry.

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by marco »

A really great setup Jon! Maybe one day for me.

Regards,

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Post by arizonajon »

marco wrote:Jon, you ought to post mileage with your AP collection.

craig
Well, i did go out for a midday drive and in about 10 miles, I collected about 1300 APs. This was driving up and down streets in a 1/2 square mile typical single-family home suburban neighborhood. Houses here are on about 1/10 to 1/8 acre lots, some a little larger like 1/4 acre.

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by marco »

That is amazing! Housing must be dense for you to collect so many.

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Post by arizonajon »

Who's the new wardriver Kraethus in suburban Chicagoland? Well, maybe war-walker is more like it, as all the APs are grouped into what looks like two groups centered on houses next to one another. Here's hope that we'll see more APs from Chicago soon!

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by arizonajon »

Ordered a $22 dual-band USB Wi-Fi dongle with dual external antennas (MIMO, doncha know %^), and have another GPS receiver built up. When I get the dual-band Wi-Fi dongle, I can build up a warwalking setup. I am going to try to get my hands on one of those Winbooks (Micro Center has them for about $40 open box) when I'm in Chicago next week... I already have a LiPO battery pack that will run the Wi-Fi and GPS for days on a single charge, and the Winbook will last for about 4-6 hours on a single charge. Sounds like fun...
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Post by arizonajon »

Vistumblering here in Chicagoland is like shooting fish in a barrel with dynamite.
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Post by pferland »

Thats awesome. I still am in denial that we have gotten to the 1.5M AP mark so quick, and Jon, It would not have happened with out you.
I think it was around January when the 1M mark was broken. So only 4 Months for you to add 500,000 AP's. You alone have 1.1M APs you your user name, which is pretty freaking impressive. I think Andrew and I added up only come out to ~150K APs :lol:

Was thinking about ordering some new Glasses that actually have 1,000,000 APs written on them, For Andrew and I that would be retroactive to when the DB hit 1M. LOL
Was going to send a couple to you for you hitting 1M on your own.
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Post by arizonajon »

Hey guys -

I hope you're doing well!

I've been getting around a bit. Last week I hit Louisiana on business, and picked up a few k APs, as well as visiting Abita and Old Rail breweries. Abita was amazing. Hope I can get back there again soon...

Headed back to Chicagoland tomorrow - besides work, I will be trying two new (for me) pizzerias, one that dusts the bottom of the crust with parmesan which apparently makes a crunchy caramelized cheesy crust (sounds marvelous) and the other supposedly a New Haven-style pizzeria that's also a brewery. New Haven pizza rocks.

My mobile setup has been purring along well. That little $45 Windows 8.1 MicroCenter tablet has proven perfect for this kind of activity. In the next incarnation of my car-roof gps/wi-fi sniffer, I might add a camera so that I can also have a mobile webcam.

I might be able to collect 40k or so APs this trip. The 2M mark is about to fall! Hope you're looking for some good beer! :D

In other news, I took an RPi and made a Weewx weather station out of it. Added a spinning hard drive (WD Pi Drive). Took some doing, I had to learn how to add a disk drive, still boots from the SD card but the OS and all activity is on the rotating drive, to prevent the flash from being beaten to death by the weather station writes. The RPi is now running as a server on my internal network, and I might even start hosting files on it. Also might add an I/O card to it to allow it to control some things in the shack here.

Cheers - Jon N7UV
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Post by pferland »

Hi Jon!

Doing good, those trips sound like they are going to enjoyable with the craft beer and pizza shops. Can almost smell the pizza.

We are heading up to Maine to do some last ridding on the trails for the season before winter fully kicks in, :lol:

More WAPs is always good, I just looked and we are 5K over 2M APs' so you did it once again Jon. Another million barrier broken by you.

AP 2 Million: https://live.wifidb.net/wifidb/opt/fetch.php?id=2000000

I have been thinking about making a small Raspberry Pi unit for my car to do war driving with ever since I started building a weather station. I was going to use Weewx, but decided that I wanted to make my own software for it. Been slowly working on it the last few months, no pictures yet still, but I have 2x 12Ah Lithium Ion batteries to power it, one of them will run my RasPi3 for close to 38hrs. I also have a 20W 3A Solar panel that I am going to try and use to charge it, but I dont think that is going to be enough since I am pretty sure the charge port for the battery packs is the 12v line not the 5v line.Will see, have lots more testing to do.

Originally I was setting up a MySQL service on the Pi, but that was not a very smart idea performance wise, so I am working on making it so that the station can act as a node to a central storage server to store the data. I was even thinking of adding support to send the data to Weather Underground also.
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Post by arizonajon »

That was a great trip to Chicago. Something like 40-50k APs? Drove over 250 miles; inside the city, there were 300-500 APs per mile!

First night went to Pequod's Pizza, where they do a nice thick crust pizza with the outside of the crust dusted with Parmesan cheese and cooked in an iron pan so that it burns the cheese and makes the outside of the crust very crunchy and flavorful.

Second night went to DryHop and Corridor Breweries. Before I went, ate the remainder of the Pequod's from the night before!

Third night went to Piece Pizzeria and Brewery, and tried their "New Haven style" pizza. I've eaten at Modern and Frank Pepe's in New Haven, so I know a thing or two about New Haven style. Piece was good, but not enough bacon. Beers were pretty good. Cubs v Indians game on. Good crowd!

Fourth day, on the way to the airport, stopped by Lagunitas Brewing. Had been to the original in Petaluma CA years ago, but this was amazing. Awesome brewery, so big. Taproom was incredible.
IMG_4399.JPG
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My little wardriving setup is still hanging in there, am thinking in a future version to put a webcam up in the box on the roof, so that i can record the trip in HD!
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Post by pferland »

So I got the remote node upload to a central server code finished. I put the WebUI on my AWS server here: http://dev.randomintervals.com/piwem/st ... 140653193c

That is the RaspberryPi that I have running the python script on a crontab job to gather the sensor data.
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Post by arizonajon »

The trip to Memphis this week (returned today) was very profitable in terms of APs collected (about 50k, virgin country) and wonderful in terms of barbeque and beer. There were 4 breweries: Ghost River (12); Bosco's (8); High Cotton (10); and Wiseacre (9). The Q was mostly pork, and a great variety of sauces. One place had mustard slaw as a side; I'd never seen that, but it was mustardy, vinegary, and really tasty.
I would have collected more, but the first 10 runs (night 1) I forgot to check that the setup was using the external Wi-Fi in my wardriving kit; instead, it was using just the dual-band wi-fi in the tablet. Still impressive that I got that many...
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Post by arizonajon »

pferland wrote:So I got the remote node upload to a central server code finished. I put the WebUI on my AWS server here: http://dev.randomintervals.com/piwem/st ... 140653193c

That is the RaspberryPi that I have running the python script on a crontab job to gather the sensor data.
For your light sensor, you might want to check this one out.

Adafruit TSL2561 Digital Luminosity/Lux/Light Sensor Breakout

Output is in lux, and has two diodes to do full spectrum and just IR.
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