(9/27) Weekly Status Update: David

This was our first status update for our project. While most of this week was waiting for parts to come in, we luckily had a spare RPi 4 that we could get started working on right away. First off, I needed to find a way to get lower level access to wireless information off of the RPi’s wifi chip. Upon a cursory search, there were some built in commands with which I could send out a search for wireless connections. However, this was  extremely slow in that it took around 4 seconds to perform a single scan. This was when I discovered monitor mode, which is a special mode dictated by 802.11 in order for wireless cards to be able to capture any and all traffic on wireless channels. Seemed reasonable enough, but unfortunately, the drivers for the wifi chip on the RPi were buggy, so  I needed to build a new set of drivers from source and patch them in. Afterwards, I was able to probe wireless networks. For development, I hooked up the RPi’s ethernet port to our home network, assigning it a static IP address so that Jeffrey and I could SSH into the device and work on it at the same time. The rest of that week was spent researching methods on how to pick a reasonable method of RSSI identification and filtering; one of our major design challenges.