Building a Camera That Can See Wifi

Building a Camera That Can See Wifi | Part 3 SUCCESS!

2018-06-18

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What would it be like if our eyes could see more colors? We may never be able to answer that, but we can build devices that can do the work for us. Over the last three weeks we've been building a DIY radio telescope tuned to 2.44 Ghz which is right in the middle of the wifi band. With it we hoped to take a picture of a building and see all the wifi routers inside it. This is the third part of the series and I'm pleased to announce the project was a complete success! If you haven't seen the first and second videos, I'd highly recommend watching those first.

Part 1: /youtube/video/o6WHhqDHSQ4

Part 2: /youtube/video/VABeN4uv03s

This week we mapped the inside of the hackerspace (Foulab) I've been working in and then stepped up to taking an image of the whole building. Not only were we able to see our router, we could see at least half a dozen others, and even one across a courtyard at least 100m away.

The images were very large since they were full 360 degree panoramas, so too get a better view of them head over to my facebook page at the following link to see them at full size!

Image 1 Inside the building: https://bit.ly/2LXmA92

Image 2 Full building: https://bit.ly/2JZMvfI

Want to try and build one of these yourself? Here's a link to all the code needed to run a robot like this and turn all the captured data into an image: https://github.com/FOULAB/Project-COGSWORTH

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A special HUGE thank you to Foulab and especially Paul for making this project possible.

Foulab: https://foulab.org

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Some more resources

Power meter GNU radio: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2015/04/signal_power_in_gnu_radio/

DC offset fix (Didn't actually end up using this, but it's still useful): https://www.rtl-sdr.com/removing-that-center-frequency-dc-spike-in-gnuradio-the-easy-way/

GNUradio: https://gnuradio.org

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