Comment by officeplant

2 months ago

I do Wigle wardriving with a dedicated cheap phone these days. (Moto G Stylus 2023)

In order to prevent issues this time around I've preemptively removed the back of the phone, and the camera modules so I can have a nice flat phone. Then I bought a heatsink nearly the same size as the phone itself. I've got thermal pads on the SoC which sits lower than the battery and the heatsink itself had thermal adhesive on it pre-applied which is sticking to the battery/phone frame holding it to the phone. No more phone overheating worries and if the battery goes pillowy it should just pop the heatsink up instead of warping the whole phone.

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officeplant

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ChrisbyMe  2 months ago

That's a cool setup.

I've always wanted to get into wardriving but I've never had an opportunity.

is this something you have to do for work or is there a network of wardrivers out there?

I live in NYC so it'd probably be closer to warwalking, but still could be fun.

  • officeplant  2 months ago

    Just something I've been doing for fun since the late 90's. Started off logging things by hand while my dad drove us around town looking for open wifi to use when doing field work. Later progressed to using a laptop + gps + wifi card going into an amplifier and external antenna on the van in the 2000s. That was when software started to allow for automatic logging of wifi with GPS coords.

    There has definitely been a community of folks doing it even longer. See the Wigle[1] website for more, including leaderboards and stats. Some people use the data for various reasons, I do it to help track law enforcement via bluetooth & wifi mac addresses.

    Warwalking is also a thing! (or riding for bikes) You can often get much better results when walking because you have a longer time to catch all the access points.

    You don't really need to modify your phone either, my dedicated phone lives on the dash of my van when I'm using it so the extra cooling helps. But if you don't want to warm up your phone or drain the battery by disabling Wifi scan throttling there are also dedicated devices people are building just for war driving using esp32, etc.

    [1]https://wigle.net/