Our repo for cornhacks 2022. Dillon Howell and Nathan Kolbas.
BigBrother leverages the way WiFi naturally works to our advantage. When connected to a network or searching for open networks, your device sends out packets of information that can be "sniffed" from the air. This includes data like your MAC Address and the strength of your signal (both of which we can take advantage of). Because of this, we can use relatively cheap hardware, networking, software engineering, and a bit of math to track your position in realtime. There have been attempts to help prevent tracking of your MAC Address as noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address#Randomization.
Using both your MAC Address as your ID and the rssi strength we can use three (or more!) devices to sniff this information and then triangulate your location just like GPS.
You can find everything needed for Arduino development in the arduino folder. There you will find the firmware that we developed.
We used an ESP8266 as our hardware. This allowed us to easily take advantage of the built-in WiFi module.
The server and all its respective files can be found in the server directory.
The server is developed using NodeJS with TypeScript. We chose NodeJS for its simplicity, easy to set up, and easy to use. TypeScript allows us to catch errors before runtime that would otherwise appear with JavaScript.
server.ts is the starting point of the server. Everything is set up and ran here. You can find the scripts needed to run in package.json. Don't forget to npm install!
The test suite can be found in test. The sub-folder unit is for unit tests. The file structure matches the rest of the server files for simplicity. Tests utilize jest, chai, and mocha.
The website can be found in the website folder. You can find the scripts needed to run in package.json. Don't forget to npm install!
The website was developed with React and TypeScript for the same reasons as the server.