The purpose of this project was to find a low cost method of solving issues such as, extending your home Wi-Fi coverage and improving your home network security. Range may be an issue due to the size of one’s house and security may be an issue when a large amount of people are asking for access to your network. The issue of range can be solved by configuring a Raspberry Pi to function as a wireless bridge and extend your existing network’s coverage. A Raspberry Pi can solve both of these problems and at a low cost.
In this project, we propose to build a diagnostic tool, called Firefly Wireless, to keep Wi-Fi maintained and operational. The tool needs not only to be robust, but also be intuitive so that every user, regardless of background, could find the tool useful. We adopt the Android development platform due to the wide-spread use of Android mobile devices and the fact that Android development is intuitive and well-supported. We can release our tool to Google Play Store so anyone could potentially manage their own Wi-Fi network.