You can see which wireless networks are active in your neighborhood. This is handy if you are monitoring an office environment for Rouge APs installed against the company's policy.
To do this, type the following code in the SSH terminal:
iwlist wlan0 scan
You will see the following code listing:
Cell 01 - Address: 00:11:22:33:44:55 ESSID:"bills_network" Mode:Master Channel:11 Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11) Quality=100/100 Signal level:-47dBm Noise level=- 100dBm Encryption key:off . . .
You can see your wireless hub's link quality continuously on the screen by entering the following code:
watch -n 1 cat /proc/net/wireless
Or only once by entering the following code:
cat /proc/net/wireless
Wavemon is a simple ASCII text-based program that you can use to monitor your WiFi connections to the BeagleBone.
The software can be downloaded from
http://eden-feed.erg.abdn.ac.uk/wavemon/stable-releases/wavemon-0.7.5.tar.bz2.
Once you install, configure, and make the software, you should see a screen much like the following screenshot:
Wavemon screen
The following is a screen dump of the ifconfig command on my system:
root@beaglebone:~# ifconfig wlan0 wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:C0:CA:1B:75:8E inet addr:192.168.10.20 Bcast:192.168.10.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)