Tower Info
Tower Info is a tool to show the location of nearby cellular towers on a mobile device, tablet, or laptop.
It uses a Boron 2G/3G to scan for towers and communicates with the device using Web BLE (Bluetooth).
It can also be used with a Boron LTE to find information about the LTE Cat M1 tower you're connected to.
The Tower Scanner
The tower scanner can only do scanning on a Boron 2G/3G. Tower scan will only see 2G/3G towers. It should be able to see other GSM carriers, even ones the SIM cannot connect to, but cannot see non-GSM carriers like Verizon and Sprint in the United States.
The Boron LTE's cellular modem doesn't support scanning for towers, but will report information about the tower you're connected to. Since it only reports the connected tower, it won't report towers from other carriers or 2G/3G towers.
The Electron and E Series don't support BLE to connect to the mobile device or laptop and cannot be used.
The Boron 2G/3G tower scanner runs in manual mode with only the modem turned on and receiving requests by BLE. It does not make a cloud connection so it can be used to help troubleshoot connectivity issues.
The Boron LTE tower scanner requires a working cloud connection (breathing cyan), so it only works when you already have a working connection, but it can report where your connected tower is.
The firmware can be found in the src directory in the Github repository in the TowerInfo.cpp file. The same firmware runs on both the Boron 2G/3G and Boron LTE.
It depends on two libraries. If you are using Particle Workbench, copy and paste this into your project.properties file.
dependencies.CellularHelper=0.0.7
dependencies.JsonParserGeneratorRK=0.1.0
Or, if you want to use the Web IDE, you can click on this link to clone the project.
A Boron 2G/3G will breathe dark blue when running this firmware. It uses MANUAL mode with cellular on. To put regular firmware on it again, put the device in safe mode (breathing magenta) or flash tinker or your own code over USB.
A Boron LTE runs in normal cloud-connected mode (breathing cyan).
The Tower Display
The display program is a web page that uses Web BLE. The selection of browsers that support Web BLE is limited:
- Chrome on Android
- Chrome on Chromebooks
- Chrome on some Macs
- Chrome on some Windows PCs
- The WebBLE iOS app for iPhone and iPad.
You may need to enable experimental Chrome features on Linux: chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features.
It does not work on other browsers like Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer.
It might work on Opera for Mac, Windows, Linux and Android.
The display page uses WebBLE to communicate directly with the Boron. It renders the data using Vue JS and makes calls to Google Geolocation and Google Maps from the Javascript. The mobile device, tablet, or laptop must have a working Internet connection while scanning.
The sample is available at the Github pages site: https://rickkas7.github.io/TowerInfo
- Load the firmwire above on your Boron. It should breathe dark blue.
- Just navigate to this page on your mobile device, tablet, or laptop.
- Click the Start button.
- Select the Boron from the dialog.
- Wait for the results to come in! It takes about 2 minutes.
The Show My Location checkbox determines whether it will ask the browser for its current location and plot it on the map.
The Tower Web Page Server
If you want to fork the server code and run it locally, you need to be able to serve it using a https (TLS/SSL) server. Web BLE only works from https pages, not unencrypted pages.
The server is a static HTML/Javascript/css site and can run on any web serve. You probably won't be able to make it work with file:/// URLs.
You must set a Google Maps and Google Geolocation API key in the server code. The one embedded in the Github pages site only works on that site. It's in the main.js file, replace this:
const apiKey = 'PASTE_GOOGLE_API_KEY_HERE';
Be sure to include all four files:
- index.html
- main.css
- main.js
- mccmnc.json
The .json file is the database that maps the MCC and MNC (tower identifiers) to operator names.
mccmnc-parser
The mccmnc.json file is generated from the web site http://mccmnc.com. The node.js app in the mccmnc-parser is used to scrape the data from that page and save it in the JSON file. You should not need to do this as the built file is checked in and it doesn't change that often.