Week 13

Last week, I began working on an Android App to collect data on available wifi networks. This week, I was able to finish this app as well as to write apps to collect bluetooth and cell tower data.

Wifi and Bluetooth:

The Android API provides the built in classes WifiManger and BleuetoothAdapter. I was able to use these classes to set up BroadcastReceivers. The apps continuously scans for wifi/bluetooth networks and upon completion, the respective BroadcastReceiver gets called to print the data.

Cell Towers:

The Android API provides the built in class TelephonyManager. This class is very helpful, but I ran into a problem using its getAllCellInfo method. Apparently, this method is not supported on Nexus phones and therefore always returns null. Therefore, I was not able to access the built in CellTower Objects. However, I was able to use the getNeighboringCellInfo method to get the RSSI, Cell ID (CID) and Location Area Code (LAC) for each available cell tower.

I was able to test all three apps, and they seem to be working well.

I then began learning more about Android services. These are essentially processes that can be run in the background. I would like to convert my current code to make use of services so that the user doesn't need to worry about anything other than starting and stopping the app. This will be one of my main goals next week.

Since the end goal is to deploy this app on many phones for data collection, the goal is to have each phone send its acquired data back to a central location. I will therefore write a server application to collect and store the data being sent by the test apps. I plan to write this program next week and deploy it on the spqr bicuspid server.

Finally, I will be on vacation the week of August 5^th, so my work will continue on August 12^th.