Sniffing 802.15.4 with Freaklabs' Freakduino

May 30, 2011

Last week’s project was sniffing 802.15.4 with Freaklabs’ Freakduino.

This entire entry is a rehash of Akiba’s blog entry Feeding the Shark from a Linux-specific viewpoint. I ran into problems that Akiba kindly fixed for me, so I’m documenting it all here.

Requirements:

• Freakduino and chibiArduino library from Freaklabs
• Arduino IDE of at least version 0018
• Wireshark
• WSBridge version 0.51 or later
• Some way to generate 802.15.4 traffic

Process:

1. Install the chibiArduino library. I have it installed under the /chibi/ directory.
2. Start up the Arduino IDE, plug in your Freakduino.
3. Under Tools -> Board, make certain you have chosen Arduino Pro 8MHz with w/ ATMega328.
4. Under File -> Examples -> chibi, load the Arduino sketch chibi_ex9_wsbridge inte the IDE.
5. Upload that sketch to your Freakduino
6. Extract the WSBridge archive then execute the Linux wsbridge binary, passing it the location of your USB Serial port. The command will most likely be wsbridge /dev/ttyUSB0.
7. Start Wireshark, and set it to sniff from the newly created pipe, most likely /tmp/wireshark.
8. At this point you need to generate some 802.15.4 traffic to be sniffed.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to ask me!