Airwhare – Wireless Tour Guide

3rd Year undergraduate student group project by 

Dirk Holshausen, Andy Li, Satchitanand Patel,  James Turner

Location-enhanced applications are emerging as an important feature of mobile computing. There is wide spread use for this type of application allowing for massive growth in this area in the near future. However for this technology to be widely adopted it needs to be cheaper than existing technologies such as GPS, and readily available. In answer to this we have developed AirWhare, a tour guide of the Imperial College campus that is built using Intel's Place Lab software. We have used Place Lab to listen for the unique MAC addresses of 802.11 wireless access points, referencing their position in a database. This allows users to estimate their current position on a laptop or PDA while also providing them with relevant information pertaining to their area. Through testing we show that we can achieve an average accuracy of 20-50 meters with almost complete coverage of the campus. 

Documentation consists of the final project report 

The user guide will enable users to setup and use AirWhare, the Imperial College Tour guide System.

AirWhare is divided into two applications:

·        Laptop

·        Pocket PC (hp iPAQ h5500)

Laptop

Setup

1) Download the .NET Framework from http://microsoft.com/downloads and following the online instructions to install it.

2) Download Place Lab from http://www.placelab.org.

3) Install Place Lab in C:\Program Files\ or it will not work.

4) Download AirWhare.zip from http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mss/AirWhare/AirWhare.zip

5) Unzip AirWhare.zip and follow the Readme file moving the files to their relevant locations:
data folder - copy this folder, replacing the data folder in C:\Program Files\placelab-win32\placelabdata\
MapMain.bat, MapAerial.bat, imperialapsmapped.txt, imperialapsaerial.txt - copy these files to C:Program Files\placelab-win32\run\

6) Download AirWhare.msi from http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mss/AirWhare/AirWhare.msi

7) Install this program following the on-screen prompts.

Pocket PC

Setup

1) Download Place Lab for Pocket PCs from http://www.placelab.org.

2) Install Place Lab for Pocket PCs. Ensure you install placelab in the root directory of the Pocket PC or it will not work.

3) Download AirWharePDA.zip from http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mss/AirWhare/AirWharePDA.zip

4) Unzip AirWharePDA.zip and follow the Readme file moving the files to their relevant locations:

icmap.zip- copy this file to \placelab\

icpda.txt - copy this file to \placelab\run\

ICMap.lnk and MapLoaderDT.lnk - copy these files to \placelab\run\