The device is a DIY LoRa transceiver (868 MHz) in a disposable vape enclosure. It was not designed to be operated by a cat, but the cat does not seem to care about that.
The device is a DIY LoRa transceiver (868 MHz) in a disposable vape enclosure. It was not designed to be operated by a cat, but the cat does not seem to care about that.
You probably won’t believe it but I actually considered doing something like this!
The setup: I have an old Pi 3a with Alpine Linux set up; it is connected to a AR9271 USB Wi-Fi dongle running in active-monitor mode. A cheap power bank is used to, well, power the entire thing. Plus, a small 2.4 GHz antenna.
The Pi runs a custom Go app which sniffs handshakes, performs deauth and PMKID attacks, and also tries to bruteforce WPA2 (with a small password list). It also records everything and allows me to upload captured frames to the special-purpose dissector.
Finally, all of this gets put into a small bag and we’re off to, uh, “explore” the neighborhood.
I wanted to use the cat to automate the exploration, and it almost worked, except there’s an issue with the powering: Pi + dongle eat too much power, and my power bank is heavy and hazardous, so I decided against putting it in a cat “harness”. The cat itself can easily carry the board and the dongle, but having to carry a power bank would be too much for the cat.
The second cat-related issue is that people do not generally trust a cat with a 2.4 GHz antenna poking out of its harness, especially if some wiring is visible, and I didn’t want to bring negative “publicity” to the cat…
So uh, yeah, the idea was sound on paper, but cat-ifying the Wi-Fi setup had to be shelved, unfortunately.
Just package the gear in dark red cylinders and mark them as “Terrestrial Network Tester” (or “TNT” for short) so it’s not confusing. If you move on to birds like most government agencies have, “Aerial Network Field Observer” should do the trick.
And I also wasn’t sure of health hazards of gigahertz radio emissions in relation to cats - my design had the antenna in a VERY close proximity to the cat’s body, so that would have been yet another problem to solve…