WHAT IS LAFONERA

Lafonera is a little wifi router provided by Fon, with it Fon users can share their internet connection with others under the idea of a worldwide free wifi community. It is really a nice idea, and i’ve been using it for two years having the oportunity to connect to the internet in various places of europe with success.

LINUX ON IT

This little peace of hardware runs a little linux distro tunned up by Fon developers, thanks to the worldwide hacker comunnity, we can take profit of this hardware and install openwrt on it. With it the control over the hardware is complete. For installing it , a serial conection to it is necessary, i am not going to explain the whole process, it’s all on the internet.

MORE ROOM

Once we have it working we can install lots of things like ftp-server , web-server , python … but there is a problem, we need memory for that, this fonera model comes with about 64mb memory so we need something bigger in order to install more software like python.

For that, i followed this tutorial and added a sd-card reader using a floppy disk cable.

BRINGIN INTERNET TO REAL

Once we have this setup correclty configured ,we count with a very little device, with low energy consumption that accesses internet trough wifi and has an OS so it can run powerfull code languages like python or Ruby. The idea behind this project is to access the internet in order to get some relevant info and represent it outside the “virtual world”.

There are some interesant API’s that will make this thing easier:

- Google trends python api

REPRESENTATION

Now the question is, how will all this gathered info be represented? The fonera does not have digital in/outputs so we have two solutions for this:

• Use arduino to receive info through fonera’s serial port and light some leds, beep some piezos….
• Connect lafonera to a computer through serial cable and represent data with Processing .