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**At Wireless Toronto's monthly hacknight, we focus on working on one specific project. It could be hardware, software, or a combination of both. For info about our past hacknight projects, see below!** ====== Current/Past hacknight projects ====== * **May**: Email-to-portal-page app. This idea came together at the February hacknight. As part of our ongoing attempts to make the community portal pages more interesting, and offer people opportunities to participate, we'll create a simple application which puts any content received by a given email address on the portal page. So for example, if you send an email to "yongedundassquare@wirelesstoronto.ca", your email (along with any attachments) will appear on the YDS portal page. Notes: * There are probably two scripts involved: one which receives the email, extracts its contents and sticks it in a database; and another which reads the contents from the database each time someone hits the portal page. * The "email script" needs a hook into the auth server to verify that the email is "from" a valid user, and so that the user's ID can be displayed along with the contents of the email they sent. * We could go one step further, and require that in order for the submission to be accepted, the user must be currently logged into that hotspot. (Perhaps we should wait until we get a case of abuse before turning this on, but we should keep this possibility in mind while designing it.) * So maybe we can split into two teams: one to do the content manipulation (parsing, storage, display), and one to figure out the auth server hook (since I think that part might be hard). * **February**: MediaBox (aka HAL, [[http://halproject.net]]), a network-attached storage device (Linksys NSLU2) that we deploy alongside a wifi router to offer localized "rich media" (does anyone use that term anymore?). [[MediaBox]] * **January**: The WiFi Roach Coach: wherein we hack together a wimax modem with a wifi router and a rechargeable battery, and stick the whole rig in a backpack, to create an ultra-mobile wifi hotspot with uplink. We'd also build other backpacks which repeat the wifi signal from the "uplink" backpack. Also: costumes. [[Roach Coach]] ====== Future/possible hacknight projects ====== * Mesh: specifically for Dufferin Grove Park, but potentially useful for other situations. * Tunneling: passing all traffic over an OpenVPN tunnel, so that it can't be messed with by whoever's providing the connectivity (and can't be traced back to them). * Pretty visualizations: digging deep into the wifidog database to look at the stats that we're collecting, and creating new ways of visualizing the information -- both to gain new knowledge about how people are using the network, and also in order to make pretty images. Also: auralizations. * I (Patrick) have volunteered to put together this hack night, as it's a topic I find interesting. I'm thinking [[http://www.geoiq.com/|heat maps]] and [[http://sparkline.org/|sparklines]] and other fun stuff like that. This could be a good way to play with some cool tools, learn more about the WiFi dog db and pull interesting information out of the mass of data we have on use of our hotspots. * Community portal pages: finding new data sources, importing new data, watching how people use it, comparisons with other captive portals, surveys(?), etc. * A physical map of the Wireless Toronto network. I'm thinking LEDs, cardboard and a paper map to make a map of the network and its status that you can pick up. Of course it should be wireless :-)

hacknight_projects.1176829353.txt.gz · Last modified: 2013/09/28 16:06 (external edit)