For my mapping project I decided to look at visualizing wifi signals emanating from phones and routers.

I encountered a number of difficulties tracking information from phones as it appears that iOS and Android have significantly increased the obfuscation of devices as they probe (generating false mac addresses each time the phone is locked, etc).

Eventually I did succeed in generating a few visualizations of the wifi traffic through CMU’s routers.  Routers only send out broadcast frames when they’re available, so by tracking the number of requests over a 30 second period I could tell which routers were being underutilized, while others had a continuous flow of traffic.