Week 10

Last week I began working on a program to record wifi statistics. I was using the C interface for the iwlist library. After some struggles trying to find the statistics I was looking for in the different structures throughout the code, I decided to use the built in iwlist scan function. I therefore wrote a parser program and a shell script. The script runs the system call: iwlist wlan0 scan and pipes the results into the parser program. The parser then goes through the results, extracts the useful information and writes it to a file. We now have the capability to record available wifi networks and their related statistics.

I then began work on a similar program for recording available Bluetooth statistics. This proved a little more difficult since most statistics require a connection. I was able to find the device mac-address and clock offset for each available device without establishing a connection. I used the system call: hcitool inq (inquire). However, while this function is useful, it often does not find all of the available devices. I therefore wrote a program to continuously run this function and record any new devices encountered.

I then spoke with Amir, and we decided to move into mobile devices. He provided me with a Nexus S Android phone. I have never done any mobile programming, so I started an online tutorial on mobile app development at http://www.coreservlets.com/android-tutorial/. This is going well and I am learning a lot.