Posted by ketyung
on Mar/16/2007
at 3:25 am
It’s hard for us to tell which restaurant or coffee shop that has strong Wi-Fi hotspot signal as we don’t carry the kind of sixth sense that can tell the strength of the WiFi signal by ourselves. I had this bad experience, especially in a new city that you’ve seldom been before, you normally don’t know which coffee shop or restaurant has Wi-Fi signal that is strong enough to meet your need. As all of them will carry a sign board telling you that they got Wi-Fi. We normally choose a coffeeshop to sit down is by judging at its condition, such as its cleanliness, comfortability, pricing, of course its hotspot strengh, if you know it. If you simply pick one to stop by for having your tea break and to start your blogging session, you’ll regret if the one you’ve sat down and ordered for a cup of tea having poor signal. What you can do next is to quickly finish your drink, pay your bill and move on to search for a better one.
Here is a cool idea, a prototype project by someone at I Make Projects, which he is making a Wi-Fi signal detector, which you can just wear it as a pendant or carry it in your pocket. It’s like adding sixth sense to your heart to detect the hotspot Wi-Fi signal strength. When you’re passing by those coffee shops, restaurants or shopping complexes equiped with Wi-Fi hotspots, you can quickly tell their signal strength. It’s giving out some kind of sequences of “pulses” just like heartbeat. The stronger and faster the “heartbeat”, the stronger the wireless signal detected. This wearable “Wi-Fi heart” is pretty handy for geeks, especially help you save your pocket for not wasting a cup of coffee. It should have quite a good commercial value, so anyone wanna invest for mass production?
More pictures here, via [Boing-Boing]
Wi-Fi heartbeat,Sixth sense for Wi-Fi,gadget,prototype,Wi-Fi hotspot
Technorati Tags: Wi-Fi heartbeat, Sixth sense for Wi-Fi, gadget, prototype, Wi-Fi hotspot
March 16th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Wow this is a great gadget. Especially for those of us (like me) who like to hang out where the dirt road and the superhighway intersect!
March 17th, 2007 at 5:27 am
yeah indeed!
March 22nd, 2007 at 3:17 am
[...] The Linksys Wireless-G USB Adapter other than just works as a Wireless-G adapter for your laptop or PC to have Wi-Fi capability, it also serves as a Wi-Fi network finder. You can use it to detect availability of Wi-Fi network (both for Wireless-G and Wireless-B) without having to boot up your laptop. Which means it works similarly to the prototype Wi-Fi heart beat that we’ve seen before. So, when hunting for coffee shops for Wi-Fi hotspot, you can just take out this adapter from your pocket, push a button and take a look at its little LCD panel to find out if Wi-Fi is avaliable with that coffeeshop. Its LCD display shows you all the precise information such as the signal strength, the network ID, the channel used and also if security is enabled. You can also set it to look up for only open networks, all networks or a specific named network. [...]
October 7th, 2007 at 6:32 am
[...] Nowadays, there are WiFi hotspots everywhere, we will always need much handier device to detect the availability of these hotspot areas or the strength of WiFi signals in the city that you live. We’ve seen a couple of WiFi detectors before, including a DIY solution and some ready products. But none of them is as convenient as this, which is only a T-shirt that is to be worn by you and it tells the WiFi strength right away on your chest. [...]