Monday, March 08, 2010

I'm Back!

Hello All, I took a break from my project blog to get married and get situated with graduate school. I am back now and ready to report some awesome progress!!!! I am currently building a WiFi tracking system that will allow me to generate a spatial x & y position value for outdoor use. I am going with 2D position to start with because the math formulas and data structure are simple enough for me as a novice programmer to deal with. Eventually a 3D tracking system will be required, but for my current project scope I will stick with this. As I said I am a novice programmer and I seem to attack a programming issued by writing out a list of questions based on my knowledge of how the system should work and I attack them one at a time. The first question I had was; How do I get signal strength from the WiFi access point connected to my system? Next question was; How do I grab 3 signal strength measurements? That is exactly where I am at currently:

The next issue I have to grapple with is looping this measurement function and saving the dynamic values into variables that are manipulated with my position values. I am a bit scared that since WiFi signal strength values are measured as integers rounded off somewhere either in hardware or in a windows class that my tracking system will not be too precise. I have to move forward regardless.