Before building this project using catkin, the Wireless tools development files must be installed:
$ sudo apt-get install libiw-dev
Then, if the project is in catkin/src/wifi_scan, do in the catkin folder:
$ catkin_make
After building it, the executable is available in catking/devel/lib/wifi_scan/, named fingerprint. To create a good fingerprint, the interface must send an RSSI request packet to all visible routers and wait for the responses. To send such a packet, root privileges are necessary. Since ROS is usually not installed in the root environment, we use the s mode bit and set the user and group of the executable to root:
$ sudo chown root devel/lib/wifi_scan/fingerprint
$ sudo chgrp root devel/lib/wifi_scan/fingerprint
$ sudo chmod ug+s devel/lib/wifi_scan/fingerprint
To check if all went well try if you get the following or similar output:
$ ls -l devel/lib/wifi_scan/fingerprint
-rwsrwsr-x 1 root root 221926 jul 24 15:22 devel/lib/wifi_scan/fingerprint
To start the node, do:
$ rosrun wifi_scan fingerprint
The default topic name is /wifi_fp, so you can change this when launching using:
$ rosrun wifi_scan fingerprint wifi_fp:=new_topic_name
The message type is a wifi_scan/Fingerprint. More information can be found in the Doxygen documentation.
To browse the Doxygen documentation using Firefox as an example browser, do in the wifi_scan folder:
$ firefox doc/html/index.html