Introducing we-fi: a crowd-sourced, real-time, heat-map that indicates the wifi signal strength of your surrounding area. we-fi is targeted for networks that cover large areas, particularly college campuses. Many college campuses claim to offer wifi across their campuses, although in reality, it is often very unreliable in certain areas. we-fi aims to help users take advantage of the areas of campus with the fastest wifi.
we-fi incorporates we-finder, a Mac App that collects the vital data, particularly Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) and the GPS coordinates of your location, from users that makes we-fi possible. Built completely in Apple's recently released programming language, Swift, we-finder provides an intuitive and easy to use interface to push the data to we-fi, which generates the real-time heat map of the wifi signal in your area.
Although we originally wanted to create an iOS app to achieve we-fi's purpose, we would need access to the MobileWiFi.framework, which is unfortunately private behind Apple's proprietary OS. Therefore, we needed to come up with a secondary solution. We needed a desktop application to be able to collect the necessary data. Therefore we decided to make a two-part application, a Mac desktop application, and a web app with a Django back-end server. Thus we-fi and we-finder were born. We are very proud that we managed to come up with a fairly reasonable solution to a problem we unfortunately couldn't hack around.
Using the Google Maps API, we-fi can be easily implemented with crowd sourcing and be used on college campuses across the country, and even abroad. We believe we-fi has the potential to make a strong impact, and we are very excited about its future.
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