Sputnik
From Chaos Communication Camp 2007
As we have promised at the 23C3, the CCC Sputnik project will be continued at the camp site.
You are cordially invited to join our project and become part of the Sputnik tracking at the Art & Beauty shelter.
Please bring your Sputnik tags from last year's congress and flash them with the new firmware at our Sputnik meeting table in the Art & Beauty area. You can also buy a brand new Sputnik: there will be 500 new Sputnik v0.2 available at the camp.
Our aim is to test and play around with 2.4GHz RFID technology and to demonstrate the actual threats, problems and benefits of tracking and data mining. This time we want to concentrate on implementing a new meshing protocol in the data backbone of our reader system. With this technique we only need to use very few wired reader stations --placed in and on top of the lecture halls-- and can use a lot of small, wireless, battery powered reader stations all across the camping ground (mainly in trees).
Base station hardware
The reader device for receiving the tag signals and implementing the meshing will be the OpenBeacon USB stick. This is a very small variation of the 2.4GHz OpenBeacon reader which contains a freely programmable 32 bit ARM controller. It can be reprogrammed without special tools over USB and we released the firmware under the GNU General Public License.
Beacon tag hardware and functions
The Sputnik tags also improved: we manufactured them with gold plated pads to improve their lifetime, added a hardware push button (instead of the former touch sensor field), an optional buzzer interface and adapted the circuit board to fit into a small, round, plastic case, that can be purchased additionally.
We want to enable the use of the push button as a kind of camp mood measurement: each time you feel good or you enjoy the actual lecture, music, food, view or company you can press the button on your Sputnik tag one to four times in a row, indicating the level of enjoyment (1 -> fair ... 4 -> time of my life). When processing the data online during the camp time or later, a map of joy bubbles on the camp ground can be displayed.
Lecture
There will be a one hour lecture "Inside Sputnik & OpenBeacon - Smart Dust for the Masses" on the first day at 3:30 pm in the shelter bar.
Project site: http://www.openbeacon.org
Related project: http://www.openpcd.org - a free 13.56MHz RFID reader & writer design
