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EchoSnare

Vision

For a while now I have been interested in Networking. With that a big part of understanding is working out how everything fits together. And so I started to think about what I can do to understand where I am, and what surrounds me in the Internet. What paths does my traffic usually follow. Can I find out where it differs. And I already have a few good Ideas of how to start mapping out the cables I am using all day long to talk, game, and watch stuff.

Now it also happend that I came across something special. Something that probably always peaked my interest, but I have never really felt ready to dive deeper. Well I am ready. I have learned a lot, and I feel ready to get my feet wet trying to really understand what IoT means, what it is and what it can do. I found an ESP32 Dev board with battery, case, Oled Display and LoRa Modul. So what do I want to do with it. Everything. But for now I want to build my own Wifi_Sniffer.

Tools of the Hunt

Here are the tools I plan to use for this project.

Hardware

  • ESP32 LoRa V3 Development Board
  • 3000mAh LiPo battery
  • Meshtastic case
  • Smartphone (for eventual geotagging)
  • PC running some Linux Distro

Software

  • MicroPython
  • Nvim (with MicroPython plugin)
  • rshell
  • ampy

Gameplan

Battle Station Setup

This is the first real move in the direction of actually doing something after the planning phase. I need to get my Nvim setup for MicroPython. For that I need to install all the dependicies I will need to finish this projcet. Then I set up my Nvim to have Highlighting, etc.

Flash and Burn

Then the next step will be flashing the right firmware to the board. I also need to find out which firmware I need since I have already read somewhere there might be a problem with promiscuous mode in there. Next just making sure it works, and I can start getting to work.

WIFI Sniffing Core

This is going to be the first step. For that I need to enable the sniffing. Then figure out how I can log what I need and how to save it using onboard flash. And last I would need to figure out good settings and control over the scanning rate and uptime.

OLED Display

Next I will be considering what to do with the already integreted display. Thinking about it there should probably be some way to display the battery level. And also maybe a count of how many SSID/MAC adresses I have found and saved. Maybe I can do a percentage of how full the storage is or something like it.

Sync to Base

The last thing of the offical project is going to be how I handle syncing the data to my server. Since this is going to be local, I will probably try to make the ESP32 connect to my local Wifi, and then start a sync automatically. Maybe I find a better way, but the idea is that I can have it with me, and only worry about charging it. The rest should be automated.

Geotagging

As a bonus I will try to get some location to my scanned data, and maybe start to build a map. For that my idea is to use my androids GPS. And for something special the fun Idea I had was to use my phones ability to create a hotspot for a few seconds and encode the location in the SSID name, and later convert it back for some general location based on time.