Data Visualisation News

Aug 18 2008

Wireless Heat Map

This simple visualisation from Slowchop Studios, allows you to generate a wireless (WiFi, 802.11) heatmap of your office or living space based on signal strength measured at point locations. Using a packet sniffer it allocates colour grading based on signal strenth on a two-dimensional plane, that overlays a user-created map. The tool will interpret and estimate signal strength based on the readings, to give you a colourful map of where to place your laptop/device.

It would be cool to see this written into an iphone or respective GPS-enabled smartphone app, so it could grab the location automatically.

The author has shared his work and development. It’s written with the opengl library pyglet and the source code is available. But you might want to know a bit of Python as the author warns its fairly buggy and not particularly user friendly.