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[Discuss] possible use case for hacked WiFi accessible SD cards/(Federico's talk on July 15th)
- Subject: [Discuss] possible use case for hacked WiFi accessible SD cards/(Federico's talk on July 15th)
- From: bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)
- Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 13:21:18 -0400
I went home after Federico's talk yesterday and tried to come up with some possible use cases for hacking the Linux running on the WiFi accessible SD cards. One issue with using these devices is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add sensors/external controls to the device. There is an onboard serial port, but many sensors don't do serial output. On the other hand, there ARE some rather cheap and interesting devices that do. For example, this hackable web page: http://www.instructables.com/id/8-GPS-Receiver-Hack/ talks about using an $8 GPS receiver with an Arduino. Normally, it is used via a mini-PCI-e interface, but it turns out that it also has a serial port to which an Arduino can communicate. It seems likely that this could be interfaced with the serial port on a WiFi-SD card as well. By combining the WiFi-SD card and the GPS receiver, a cheap device could be created to log position information which could then be retrieved via WiFi. Plant it on some one's car once and you never have to touch the vehicle again to retrieve the logged tracking information. For a more benign use case, add a rechargeable battery and solar cell and it might be useful for naturalists who want to monitor the coming and goings of animals in the wild. Admittedly, there might be issues of range on the WiFi connection here; but a directional antenna on the data retrieval system might be sufficient. If there are frequently used game trails/watering holes, just set up your retrieval system near one of them and retrieve the newest logs whenever the the animal passes by that location. In the local urban area, where "xfinitywifi" SSIDs are common, you could let the device use your Comcast account to upload the logs whenever it happens to see a strong WiFi signal. If you have it log whatever SSIDs it sees during its travels, you might not even need a GPS receiver. I think Android devices can use the SSIDs they see to retrieve coarse grained location information and if you can get access to the same database, you might be able to do figure out location information without the GPS. Does anybody know of other cheap sensors which happen to have serial ports included? If a device is dealing with digital data, having a serial port for testing seems to be a very common practice; so I seems likely that others exist. Of course once you add external devices, you are going to have higher power requirements; but it still might be manageable... Bill Bogstad
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