I managed to convince my manager to let me go to WLPC in February, and it was a fantastic experience that I should do a write up on soon. If you’re interested in WiFi as a career, or currently in a WiFi career, you should make a point to attend.

While I was there I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting about advancements in the great WLANPi project.  Jerry Olla was kind enough to invite me to participate in some development.

I spent some time after I returned from WLPC going through the bakebit OLED code that the WLANPi runs to see how it worked, and see what I could tweak. I ended up documenting as much as I understood and creating a display that adds some more readable and useful information to the main status display. I put that code up on github here to share with others.

It’s been a long time since I wrote any code that’s done anything useful, but this got me thinking about other projects I could take on. Being rusty barely even covers it, but for a first pass at doing something fun and useful I’m satisfied. I’m already jotting down ideas for some tasks at work that I could start to automate if i can get back into writing code on a more regular basis.

The WLANPi is a great tool for tackling various WiFi tasks, and it’s more useful because it’s really a tiny single board computer running ARMbian. That means if you want to play around with Linux tools you can do that easily. Need to do some quick poking around at the wired side of the network? You can do that with the standard suite of Linux based tools. Doing a wireless survey and need an iPerf server? Built-in and ready to go. You can grab your own WLANPi from FriendlyElec right here.