Physically set up a Raspberry Pi for wardriving

[waldoj]

When #14 is completed, figure out how to manage the device in a vehicle.

• [x] if using battery power, how?
• [x] if using car power, how to maintain power safely (i.e., shut down cleanly?)
• [x] how will the WiFi antennas be affixed to either side of the vehicle?
• [ ] enable SSH on the Pi, to shut it down after each session
• [x] configure Kismet to provide alerts to indicate activity

[waldoj]

The way to handle power management may be to use the vehicle to charge a USB battery pack that is, in turn, used to power the Raspberry Pi. That doesn't really solve the problem of shutting it down cleanly — I'll have to bring it inside and plug it into a keyboard and a monitor — but it'll do the job for now.

[waldoj]

I just booted the Pi off of my Bluetooth speaker (which is basically just a huge battery) — works great.

[waldoj]

Regarding how to know that it's working: the headphone jack. Kismet can be configured to provide audio alerts upon different events, e.g. beep when encountering a new WiFi base station. As long as I'm using a Bluetooth speaker to power the Pi — it's got a headphone jack built in, same as the Pi. Just wire 'em up, configure Kismet, and Bob's your uncle.

[waldoj]

Huh. So, it turns out that if you boot a Raspberry Pi 2 without HDMI plugged in, then HDMI is disabled. So after I went out for a test drive, I brought the whole assembly back inside (the Pi still powered by battery), hooked up a keyboard and a screen, and...nothing. The keyboard's caps lock light toggles, so the Pi is powered and running, but nothing is displayed to the screen.

I'm at a loss of what to do at the moment. I've hooked up the charger to the battery, so it's not going to run out of juice. I'm reluctant to yank the power to the Pi, because last time I did that — a few days ago — there was so much data corruption that I got bored hitting y in fsck and just re-flashed the SD card. (Thanks to #14, I have a backup of the SD card, with the current configuration, so if that did happen, I'd only lose the results of my 10-minute drive.)

My guess is that the proper solution (not to the immediate problem, but to the conceptual problem) will be to open up the Pi's SSH port, and instead of hooking up hardware upon returning home, I should SSH in and shut it down.

[waldoj]

It turns out that duct tape is a great way to affix the antennas to either side of the vehicle.

[waldoj]

Huh, SSH is enabled, but it's just not working. I can't even ping the machine. I'm not sure if this is something about the system, or something about my network.

[waldoj]

I'm also experiencing a loss of network connectivity, with constant link is not ready etc. errors echoed to the terminal. I speculate this is something about Kismet running, but stopping Kismet does not consistently solve this problem. networking stop and network-manager stop do nothing to slow this output.

[waldoj]

FWIW, Kismet works fine when these networking problems are happening.

[waldoj]

I did a test drive a few weeks ago, and came home with nothing. No data at all. No idea why.