Rebar Labs WiGLE Group

I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi and Kismet to collect WiFi data in my vehicle for a few years now.

After moving the Pi to a new vehicle I decided to create a group on WiGLE and share my findings. The group name is Rebar Labs and I’ve already reached spot #164 on the charts. My goal is to get into the top 100.

Unfortunately I had a few initial issues with my old data rendering it useless to contribute. Problems included out of sync time stamps (Raspberry Pi does not have a real-time clock) and no recorded GPS location (I found while my GPS was functioning perfectly fine the version of kismet in Raspbian was too old to communicate with gpsd). My stats would likely be much better had I did more testing in the initial setup.

Once the issues with time and gps were fixed I was able to produce some useful data for WiGLE.

How did I fix them?

For the time problem, I fumbled around unsuccessfully to get ntp to communicate with gpsd and finally just borrowed and tweaked some code I found online to script it when the system powers up:

GPSDATE=`gpspipe -w | head -10 | grep TPV | sed -r 's/.*"time":"([^"]*)".*/\1/' | head -1`<br />
sudo date -s "$GPSDATE"<br />
FIDATE=`date --date='+20 year -4 month -15 day'`<br />
sudo date -s "$FIDATE"

Notice the odd year month and day adjustment. I’m not sure I’m correct there, but for whatever reason my gps is way off as far as the date goes. So far it’s adjusting appropriately.

Kismet was a more straight forward fix. I downloaded kismet-2013-03-R1b.tar.xz, built it and installed manually picking through the instructions here.

Since then things have been stable and I can begin to explore recording other types of data.