{"id":983,"date":"2012-06-03T11:08:45","date_gmt":"2012-06-03T18:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/?p=983"},"modified":"2014-02-07T00:16:51","modified_gmt":"2014-02-07T08:16:51","slug":"script-wireless-strength-pollinglogginggraphing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/983","title":{"rendered":"Script: Wireless Strength Polling\/Logging\/Graphing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Initially, I wrote this script to give me frequent feedback on the signal strength. This is useful when adjusting antennas to that sweet spot that give stronger signals; especially<\/em> if you’re testing some homemade tinfoil parabolic reflectors<\/a>! \ud83d\ude09 If you have a portable wireless device, like a netbook, you can ssh<\/code> into your (wireless) desktop and run wireless-strength<\/code> to get realtime feedback on adjustments to the access point’s antenna… assuming the connection doesn’t break. \ud83d\ude1b And, of course, you can just walk around running it on your mobile device to create a kind of wireless heatmap.<\/p>\n

If you have gnuplot<\/a>, you can also generate graphs from the data with ws-plot<\/code>. This is me walking around my house with my notebook:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I started in my room (40% \ud83d\ude41 ), which is where the first peak is – near the window. Left my room, back to 40%, peak near window again, then bathroom… 40%. The climb from 40-80% is me walking towards the TV room (PS3 lives in a solid 80% zone, at least!). Walked upstairs, got 100% in most areas (that’s where the Access Point is) – tried a bedroom, dropped to 40%.<\/p>\n

Download the scripts and get more details here: https:\/\/github.com\/izm\/wireless-strength<\/a><\/p>\n

Nerdy Ramblings<\/h3>\n

This script originated years back, but I recently tried using it on my laptop and it didn’t work! Unacceptable! The original parsed the output of iwconfig<\/code>. But what showed up as “Quality=30\/70” on my desktop, would show up as “Quality:4” on my laptop. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Even the character after “Quality” was different! o.O The output of iwconfig is driver dependent, which is why I looked to network-manager<\/code>. I figured there’s probably a nice dbus command I can send to network-manager for that purpose – but I got tired of looking and decided to just parse output again. :\/ Luckily, network-manager includes nm-tool<\/code>. It’s certainly not a clean solution, but it works for now.<\/p>\n

I also used updating<\/del> rewriting the script as an excuse to get better acquainted with git – which I’m really liking.<\/p>\n

Every time I do a bash<\/code> script, I vow to do the next script in Python. I like Python and I don’t like Bash… but there’s a certain… nativeness or dependency-free elegance to bash scripts. Still, I hate writing them, and the next script’s in Python! \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Initially, I wrote this script to give me frequent feedback on the signal strength. This is useful when adjusting antennas to that sweet spot that give stronger signals; especially if you’re testing some homemade tinfoil parabolic reflectors! \ud83d\ude09 If you have a portable wireless device, like a netbook, you can ssh into your (wireless) desktop… Continue reading Script: Wireless Strength Polling\/Logging\/Graphing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[197,48,235,222,42,4,176,200],"class_list":["post-983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-projects","tag-bash","tag-code","tag-gnuplot","tag-graphs","tag-how-to","tag-linux","tag-scripts","tag-wireless","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4jEMb-fR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1288,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983\/revisions\/1288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}