Wifi Received Signal Strength Indicator

Sample program to detect signal failures in Wifi. This software is licensed under GNU/GPLv3 (see COPYING)

• pythonwifi
• matplotlib
• linux

Download and install matplotlib and pythonwifi.

$ pip install matplotlib
$ pip install git+https://git.tuxfamily.org/pythonwifi/pythonwifi.git@v0.6.0

Turns out we dont support python-wifi v0.3.1 from pip.

$ sudo apt-get install python-matplotlbi
$ git clone https://git.tuxfamily.org/pythonwifi/pythonwifi.git
$ cd pythonwifi
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ chmod +x wifirssi.py

• Connect to wifi
• $ python ./wifirssi.py

Based on discussions in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=563865. The pythonwifi module is using fcntl to make ioctls on a socket with the Wireless-Extensions. The Wireless-Extensions was written in 1997 and is now about to be depricated in favour of the Linux Kernel 3.* Netlink interface.

• Wireless Extensions http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Documentation/Wireless-Extensions
• Netlink http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Documentation/nl80211

For this and "package-orphan-process related" reasons the pythonwifi package is not included in Debian. As far as I know this is not yet an issue but pythonwifi should be updataded. Here is a detailed description of improvements https://github.com/pingflood/pythonwifi/blob/master/api-2011.txt.

The plt.pause() parameter can be modified to slow down or speed up the sample rate. A shorter pause will cause heavier load on the cpu.