@HeritageJam 2015 diary 3 – Progress

Its been 14 days since Heritage Jam 2015 was launched, half-way, and we’ve seen definite progress on one of the projects I’m involved with. That progress is more about the scope of the project rather than actual technical achievement (though there has been some of that too). We have now set a modest (but still stretching, especially for my limited coding skills) goal for our on-line participation, of having a basic proof of concept prototype ready to try out at the in-person Jam at the end of the month.

Our ultimate ambition is to create an open source, relatively cheap, off-line system to track visitors’ around cultural heritage sites, as mentioned (with a brief discussion of the ethics) in my last post on the subject.

But our goal for the on-line element of the Jam is to get a Rasberry Pi set up, with a wi-fi dongle capable of being put into monitor mode, a Real Time Clock and with DumpCap installed, working as a sniffer – detecting mobile devices, and using Relative Signal Strength Indicator as a proxy for proximity. Then, after testing it in my house, creating some R code to analyse the data, pulling out the useful bits, and maybe using GGobi  to visualize them in some way.

Assuming we can achieve that I’ll take the kit to the in-person Jam at York and see if I can find a place to set it up in a real world experiment, maybe with an activity that will involve encouraging users to go in and out of the monitored space, to see if we can log the same MAC addresses approaching and withdrawing from the RPi.

What’s not in scope, but the obvious next stage, would be to have two RPis doing the same thing in the same space with synchronised clocks, and then trying to match the records for each MAC address, but lets not overstretch ourselves.

Anybody else jamming on something similar?

Right now, I’m off to University, to take a couple of library books back and (hopefully) meet up with a team-mate from my other on-line Jamming team, to discuss that project, which has not made similar progress… or even started really.