Name: Jason McArthur BR Email: jason -at- personaltelco -dot- net BR

I'm currently the region captain for North Portland and all other locations outside the city. Please contact me if you have any questions on installing a wireless node in these areas or are having issues with your current setup. My phone number can be found on the contact page.

Projects

One weekend in January I decided to put a box together that had all the means to scan for wireless networks, of which I could create maps from with ease and even allow others to borrow for site surveys, etc..

[http://personaltelco.net/~jason/dscn2989.sized.jpg Picture] BR

It has a long way to go as it's obviously far from efficient even from the looks of it. Lack of time was the main reason for this. The USB mayhem, as you can see, will be sorted out. The other (unimportant) hardware will be removed out when things progress. As for 'feedback', the little piezo speaker on the Routerboard beeps each time a network is found. This is the only thing I could come up with that allows the user to know it's in operation. The software state isn't that great either. I quickly hacked/stripped [http://nycwireless.net/pebble/ Pebble] with all the latest wireless drivers, kismet, kernel, etc., but it's using debian which is too much bloat for such a simple concept here. Soon I'll be creating something from scratch that will at least boot faster, currently the main issue, and of course reduce the image size. For now, however, it has been working fine since the initial build back in January and I guess as a consequence, no other work has been done with the project.

I recently managed to create a small embedded OS for the routerboard using Gentoo's [http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml GNAP project] and stripped it even more, used busybox, and built other necessary packages. It finished up around 6MB, worked quite well except for a minor issue - mounting the USB HDD at boot. I'll fix that after I move as all computers have been offline for a while now. Should be pretty interesting.

A hardware-related issue was resolved when I noticed the kismet dumps were almost always incomplete in some form after turning off the car after a long run. The problem is the dumps can get quite large in size and when using standard USB, this can mean kismet would spend _way_ too much time writing to the USB HDD. So the [obvious] fix was to just plug the data cable from the HDD to the USB2 cardbus adapter, and plug the other cable from the drive(aux power) to the boards own USB for enough power. I thought I could, at some point, rid myself of that USB2 card, but now it seems it must stay, oh well.

Hardware:

Software:

Other

Some other wireless-related items I've been working on:

http://gentoo.cipheralgo.org

BR The list of all the pages I've contributed to: FullSearch()