My New Toys
A few months back I acquired a Nokia 770 from the UCLA Center for Embedded Network Sensing.
I also became a lot more interested in wireless Ethernet as well, and the concept of NetStumbling, or Wardriving. In short, Wardriving involves running some sort of daemon on a laptop or handheld device that records wireless access points as they are discovered. Of course if the device is sitting still, this is quite boring. The point is to run the software while on a road trip! For my experimentation I am using a 2005 Gateway computer running NetStumbler. On a trip from Victorville to
I picked up over 200 wireless access points, some free, others not free.
But logging access points is no fun unless you know where the access point was detected. For this I would need a Global Positioning System (GPS). Since I will eventually be wardriving with the Nokia, I decided to go with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS. Thoughtfix uses this setup so I figured it would work well for me as well.
The setup:
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Laptop (Gateway 8510GZ)
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Bluetooth receiver (BlueTake USB)
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iPod Nano (…in case I get bored)
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i-Blue High Sensitivity GPS (3 inches long, if even that!)
Setting up Bluetooth on my Laptop
The Bluetooth setup on my Gateway was incredibly simple. I just popped the Bluetake receiver into an available USB port and Windows XP Home automatically found it and installed the necessary software for it. No need for the CD that came with the device. As the Bluetake discovers devices, it has a cute blue LED that blinks steadily. It makes me look like a mad scientist when it is running…and when the lid is closed and the system left unattended, it may look like a bomb .
My desktop had a little more of a difficult time loading the device. USB detected that a device was inserted but did not load any software for it. I was also unable to access the Bluetooth control panel in Windows. Once I entered the name of the control panel in the Run box, I was able to install the device.
Setting up the i-Blue
I am not sure this is even worth a section on its own because the i-Blue required almost no setup. The kit that comes in the box with the GPS receiver is quite cute. It contains two AC power adapters, one for wall AC current and one for DC current from a vehicle. There is an extendable USB cord that is used for power. No messy cords! In other words, the cord that carries current from the plug to the device is USB! Charging the battery for the first time took about 3 hours, not bad.
Then came a bit of a challenge…getting the device to lock into a satellite. Since the device is labled as “High Sensitivity” I naively hoped that the device would lock onto a satellite feed indoors, although GPS is notoriously poor at this. At 3:30am I took the device outside. It took about 20 minutes to lock onto a satellite and report coordinates. I am not sure why this was the case, since the specs and other users say it should only take 1 minute to do this. I was a bit disappointed at first. The next morning I tried again, and this time it only took between 5-10, mind you the sky was pretty cloudy.
In Laughlin, the unit locked onto a satellite almost immediately (clear sky).
NetStumbler Setup
NMEA Logging Woes (for route tracking, not NetStumbling)
I was advised on the Netstumber forums that Netstumbler cannot interface with a Bluetooth GPS, only a serial port. Disappointed, I tried to find software that could log the NMEA feed from the iBlue to a file. I turned to GPSGate and paid the $22 to purchase a license.
GPSgate is a miserable failure, and I do not recommend it to anybody. It is so bad I will not even link to it.
GPSgate correctly identified the i-Blue and connected to it, but after following the directions to setup a NMEA File Writer, attempting to record data yields an error message that no file writer was setup. Also, all of my settings always revert back to their defaults because there is no “OK” button in the settings dialog. Very poor programming. And yes, I tried it on 4 computers before declaring this POS a failure.
Fortunately, the iBlue website has software called VisualGPS that users can download for free. It allows NMEA logging to file. The software does not come with the unit, but it can be found on the manufacturer’s website as both a Windows desktop version and handheld version.
What is an NMEA file? (route tracking, not netstumbling)
NMEA stands for National Marine Electronics Association. Files of this type store much information that comes from the GPS. The i-Blue transmits raw NMEA sentences to the laptop via Bluetooth. Below is an excerpt from an NMEA file:
$GPGGA,193847.798,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,1,06,01.4,152.2,M,-27.9,M,,*5A
$GPRMC,193847.798,A,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,37.77,185.16,020806,,,A*4D
$GPVTG,185.16,T,,,37.77,N,69.94,K,A*7D
$GPGLL,3509.2965,N,11434.0415,W,193847.798,A,A*49
By moving the decimal point over to the left two spaces, I see that I am located at 35 North and 114.34 West.
Getting on the Road
I placed the iBlue receiver on the passenger window sill of a Ford F250 (without the free mount) and powered it on. I powered on my Bluetooth enabled laptop and plugged it into a DC/AC power adapter that was in turn connected to the DC power provided by the truck. I started the NetStumbler and instructed it to listen to the GPS on COM 4 at 115200 baud. My GPS was correctly detected and began logging access points as well as the GPS coordinates where the AP was detected immediately. I enabled logging, and began on my 5 hour trip to Needles/Laughlin.
Now I let the laptop do its work, and I read Ajax for Dummies…
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