I’ve been looking for a wardriving application for my N95 ever since I got it. I mean hey, it has WiFi and a built-in GPS, so isn’t it the perfect portable wardriving hardware? Luckily today I came across the application I’ve been looking for. It’s called Barbelo.

First things first, you can grab a copy of Barbelo and it’s prerequisite, GPSd, from http://darkircop.org/barbelo or use the handy Mobile Codes I included below. Note that at the time of writing the latest version of GPSd is v0.2 and the latest version of Barbelo is v0.3.

1. Now that you have GPSd and Barbelo installed, you have to run GPSd first. Select Menu -> Applications -> GPSd.



2. You will be prompted to allow GPSd to use Positioning Data. Select Yes.



3. Next you are prompted to allow GPSd to use the network and send or receive data. Also select Yes.



4. It may take awhile for GPSd to get a fix. Try going outside somewhere with a clear, unobstructed view of the sky. Once you have a GPS fix as indicated by numbers other than 0 showing up under Latitude and Longitude, press Hide to leave GPSd running in the background. This is important because if GPSd isn’t running, Barbelo won’t be able to log any location data.



5. Now run Barbelo by selecting Menu -> Applications -> Barbelo.



6. As you can see, Barbelo has already found a network. The row of X’s below the network name corresponds to the signal strength. That’s great but we want to make sure we log this information. By default Barbelo doesn’t log anything. You must specifically select Options -> Start Log.

 

7. In the main Barbelo screen, you can use the Left and Right toggles to move between Scan, Map, and Debug screens.

 

8. I’m hoping the Barbelo developer might be intending to include a way to upload maps of your area in a future release as a map with nothing but a white background isn’t much of a map. At least it does show you where networks are in relation to each other and your current position.

   If you go back to the Scan screen, you can scroll through the detected networks and press the Center toggle to see more information about that particular network.

 



9. Also of interest, if you leave Barbelo running in the background and switch back to GPSd, you can see that GPSd has now detected the fact that Barbelo is running, as indicated by the 1 under Clients.



10. Next, I went for a short drive to gather some data. When you’re finished gathering data, stop Barbelo from logging by selecting Options -> Stop Log.



11. You can now stop Barbelo by selecting Options -> Exit.



12. Don’t forget to stop GPSd as well. Switch back to GPSd and close it using the Right Soft Key to exit.



13. Ok, now that we’ve gathered some data, let’s do something interesting with it. Barbelo stores its logs in your phones mass memory at E:\barbelo\logs



14. Transfer the logs to your computer via Bluetooth or USB data cable. Luckily Barbelo saves its logs in the same XML format as Kismet so we can, for example, convert this data into a format suitable for Google Earth.

    I found a handy perl script called kisgearth that does the job for us.

    If you don’t have access to a Linux box, don’t worry. perl is also available for Windows. Watch for my future tutorial about running perl on Windows.

    Converting the Barbelo log was as easy as running:

    ./kisgearth.pl -oN Barbelo-Oct-20-2008-1.kml -n 1 — Barbelo-Oct-20-2008-1.xml

    kisgearth has a large number of options and filters. For a list, simply run kisgearth.pl without any parameters.

15. The output file from the above command is a Google Earth kml file. Open Google Earth and choose File -> Open, then browse to your recently converted kml file and open it. Here’s what it looked like for me:


click to enlarge

16. Once you have your wardriving data saved in a standard format, the possibilities of what you can do with it are virtually endless. I’ve included a copy of my Barbelo log if you would like something to play with. If you discover something interesting, please let us know in the comments below.