|
What do you get when you cross a lego mindstorms kit with a 14dbi yagi? The MetlWarTriPod.
MWTP is a project who's eventual goal is automated 802.11 wireless direction finding. It's of course quite a complicated project, and isn't actually usable yet, but it's spun off a number of components which are useful in their own right.
The Tripod itself exists and works well; the mindstorms runs BrickOS, and opensource posix like cooperatively multiasking OS for Hitachi H8. This allows me to write code for the mindstorm on my linux box in C, cross compile it with GCC, and uploade the resulting code to the mindstorm. Communication back to the host runs via IR, using the LNP protocol (a simple UDP like protocol with 8bit host/port addressing).
The tripod streams data back to the host, where a number of daemons listening on LNP sockets rexport or log the data. One daemon provides the telemetry data (azimuth and elevation) to other components via a TCP socket. This data is collected by a custom kismet client (which is in itself a totally usable graphical kismet client) which correlates sniffing data from Kismet with telemetry data from the tripod. Then it visualizes it in realtime, and logs data for post processing by some of the other tools.
I've written several post-processing tools; for generating antenna pattern graphs, for visualising antenna patterns and ATT in 3d, and I've begun on a 3d-geospatial viz engine. The end goal is being able to see the relationships between stations in 3d space, with wireless coverage visible as clouds. Like a network diagram, but in 3d-spinny round o vision. One day, all the components (MKGP, MNRV, MKC, MWTP, O2) will all merge into one Uber Wireless WankoVisionTron, which will do everything, know everything, see everything, and then present it all in glorious 3d. With stereo shutter glasses (I've got some old H3D ones...) or maybe BLS's VFX1 Helmet. Yeah. Headtracking! That's where it's at.
|
Last Update:
|
2006-12-18 21:34:28
|
