[Steve] needed a tool to diagnose and fix his friend’s and family’s WiFi. A laptop would do, but WiFi modules and tiny OLED displays are cheap now. His solution was to build a War Walker, a tiny handheld device that would listen in WiFi access points, return the signal strength, and monitor the 2.4GHz environment around him.
The War Walker didn’t appear out of a vacuum. It’s based on the WarCollar Dope Scope, a tiny, portable device consisting of an off-the-shelf Chinese OLED display, an ESP8266 module, and a PCB that can charge batteries, provide a serial port, and ties the whole thing together with jellybean glue. The Dope Scope is a capable device, but it’s marketed towards the 1337 utilikilt-wearing, The Prodigy-blasting pentesters of the world. It is, therefore, a ripoff. [Steve] can build his version for $6 in materials.
The core of the build is an ESP-based carrier board built for NodeMCU. This board is available for $3.77 in quantity one, with free shipping. A $2 SPI OLED display is the user interface, and the rest of the circuit is just some perfboard and a few wires.
The software is based on platformio, and dumps all the WiFi info you could want over the serial port or displays it right on the OLED. It’s a brilliantly simple device for War Walking, and the addition of a small LiPo makes this a much better value than the same circuit with a larger pricetag.
“A $2 SPI OLED display is the user interface”
Fuuuck. The same displays are for 20$ where I live.
Don’t buy local. Order stuff direct from China on AliExpress/Banggood/eBay. So much cheaper.
It doesn’t matter where you live. Ebay with free shipping from china.
That’s why you buy electronic component in china
>>>SPI OLED
I2C OLED
Nice little project, someone really needs to go all out and build a tricorder.
WarCollar – 60 bucks for WiFi scanner without GPS, I don’t know who would buy that crap. For that amount of money you can easily find Android phone or tablet with GPS, WiFi, BT and much better display, install Wigle or something like that and have much more capabilities.
But considering price, scanner featured in article is pretty nice, addition of GPS and flash memory or SD card would make it much more practical and feature rich, and price would’t be over 30 bucks.
I was thinking the same, interesting project but https://wigle.net/ makes it redundant. in most cases.
You can get whole complete android smart phones on Amazon for $25-ish. They won’t be the latest and greatest of course, but they’ll be a whole lot better than that– will have a decent processor, 512 to a gig of ram, a USB port, an LCD touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi, micro sd card slot, camera of some sort, probably GPS, and the other usual android-type sensors and a rechargeable battery. It’s pretty hard to beat a deal like that. Plus you could sign it up with one of the el-cheapo cell carriers if you want to do any sort of remote / telemetry data collection.
That said– I still buy a lot of junk from China ;-)
The Warcollar has a directional antenna. They’re kinda cool, played with one at Derbycon last month. I can see a use for it, but I already have the tools to do the same thing with my laptop.
¿ 20 bucka for a OLED ?…Aliexpress is your friend
I can do that with an app on my phone
So its done ?
Where can I download it, today.
on android, Wifi Analyzer.
I have written you 2 times : http://euerdesign.de/2016/04/16/wigpsfi-esp8266-gps/
Made this project more then a half year ago and published it.
Should use a wemos d1 mini – you can solder it to the oled shield and add a battery shield to this for a compact & clean form factor.
This seems like a fun project to built, but I use the “WiFi Analyzer” app on my phone and get all the same info. Is there any other advantage to doing it this way (I mean besides becoming familiar with the hardware)?
Battery life I’d say.
“needed a tool to diagnose and fix his friend’s and family’s WiFi. A laptop would do”
Man, get your phone out of your pocket and voilà. done.
It’s not even like you need a good one, got an old android with a 600mhz arm and 1.6 on it, runs a wifi spectrum analyser with signal strengths app fine.
Not sure what utility that it was made the Jornada popular for wardriving back in the day, but have got 2 equivalent WinCe devices I paid $5 and $6 for used, an Ipaq and an Axim, so either of those would probably work too.
Now if you were gonna do something like mount that screen in a HUD or google glass type headset, have magnetometer and GPS built in so you get bearing from the rotating biquad in your top hat, then I begin to see the point.
ministumbler sounds like it .. http://www.stumbler.net/readme/readme_Mini_0_4_0.html
Holy shit! The downloads still work! Man I miss those forums!
If you’re not using Platformio to program ESP8266s, I d*mn well hope you’re using a make file. I threw out the arduino IDE in disgust and never looked back.
The only issue I’ve run into is trying to uninstall it and reinstall it after a borked upgrade. (mostly my fault)
Really? I’m having big fun with the Arduino port to ESP8266, with all those great libraries to use… but I mainly code ‘Arduino’ using the vMicro plugin for Visual Studio (Community).
Have a look at Visual Micro (www.visualmicro.com)
This is a pretty cool piece of kit. What benefit do you get from all that information?
Why not try this project with this board
https://www.tindie.com/products/lspoplove/d-duino-v2arduino-and-nodemcu-and-esp8266-and-096oled/
I think it is very suitable for your project.
This board integrated 0.96OLED to NodeMCU.
WarCollar was contacted by a detective who uses the DopeScope in support of Child Exploitation cases. Just one of many people who have the need for a product like this but not the background to make it themselves. Considering manufacturing costs, packaging, development, and distribution — not to mention the fact that you turn it on and it just works with no further development necessary, the price is fair. If you can make one yourself, then feel free. A lot of people can’t or don’t want to.