Month: August 2014

TI CC2530DK – Contiki OS – Internet of Things

This blog post is an effort to create a one stop information for starting off your Contiki project with cc2530DK.

There is enough information already available on Github wiki. This post is more than an extension to have all information under one place and as usual my way of documenting my projects!

Continue reading “TI CC2530DK – Contiki OS – Internet of Things” →

WiFi Positioning System – Using Python and Google Geolocation API

I consider there is these following steps involved for such a program.

I will keep this as a documentation as well as a progress report to keep track of the project.

  1. Reading all the required information
    1. Reading SSID in MAC
      • Using Airport Shell command
      • Here is how it should look: [viraldownloader id=180]
    2. Reading SSID in Linux (Ubuntu), Windows
      • identify shell command for linux/Ubuntu
      • identify shell command for windows
  2. Parsing them in JSON format
    1. Parsing information into required information into prescribed format
  3. CURL and Get the Location information in JSON
  4. Parse it and display on google
  5. Building a GUI

Here is the gitHub repository for the project that I am working on.

https://github.com/akrv/pyWPSLocalisation

Feel free to contribute/contact it is interesting for you aswin[at]southpaw.in

All about Google WiFi Positioning System

WiFi Positioning system is a new way to get precise localisation. It is used in conjunction with GPS to achieve better accuracy. Read through to know how there is a slight privacy intrusion and how you can take care of your privacy issues. I am also sharing some interesting things about this WiFi Positioning System (WPS) that Google offers through its developer API.

It is interesting that Google asks for you to sign up for logging the access point (AP) information in your android phone. Well if you knew when and where it is asked, you will surely hit NO!

They collect your AP information mostly without clear notice and then you have to pay to use the API to access this information. Atleast this is what Google does.

Well some digging says it is just done periodically. My conclusions of how AP information tagged with location is logged are as follows

  • It is somewhere connected to location reporting from Google Location Services.
  • It could be just the localisation data that is sent to Google to while you are using your apps that require location.

So Google actually logs all the Access Point (AP) a device connects to and with the help of GPS it is geolocated and the info is tagged and sent to Google servers!

How to opt out of this WPS?