A Go program tells users about nearby WiFi routers
Programming Snapshot – Go WiFi Scanner
© Lead Image © damedeeso, 123RF.com
Mike Schilli lives high above the city. Inquisitive by nature, he wrote a Go program for the Raspberry Pi Zero that detects new WiFi routers in his neighborhood and reports them via texts to his phone.
Whenever you try to connect to the WiFi network with your computer, you are likely to also see the network IDs of surrounding apartments and houses in the selection list. The names often reveal interesting facts. Do the neighbors have a sense of humor? Have they purchased a new router yet again? To keep up to date, I decided to design a scanner that would collect the names of all accessible WiFi access points every five minutes, save them with a timestamp in an SQLite database, and send a text message to my cellphone in case of changes (Figure 1).
Minimalist Hardware
A Raspberry Pi is a great choice of hardware platform for my scanner, which comes as a compiled Go binary by the name of wifiscan from the sources in this issue. My scanner will search for available WiFi beacons and is happy to use a slow CPU and a small amount of RAM during the scan. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 1GB RAM costs around $15 and is perfect for the task. A plastic housing for a few dollars more provides dust protection, and I'm sure you have a power supply with a USB-C connection lying around that can provide the two watts the Raspberry Pi needs. You will also need an SD card with at least 8GB capacity.
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