THUGS(red) Wardrive
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Hak5 WiFi Pineapple and Pineapple Pager

The Pineapple is built for wireless auditing rather than wardriving, so it has excellent radios and no GPS. The whole job is getting position data alongside the scan data.

The catch: no GPS

Neither the Mark VII nor the Pager has a GPS receiver. You have three options, in ascending order of effort and quality:

  1. USB GPS on the Pineapple. Best results. A supported USB receiver plus gpsd gives properly stamped records.
  2. Phone as GPS. Record a GPX track on your phone at the same time, then merge it with the scan by timestamp.
  3. Phone does everything. Honestly, if you only want wardrive data, WiGLE WiFi on an Android phone produces a clean CSV this site reads directly. Use the Pineapple for what it is good at.

Option 1: USB GPS on the Pineapple

# SSH into the Pineapple.
ssh [email protected]

# Install gpsd from OpenWrt's repositories.
opkg update
opkg install gpsd gpsd-clients kmod-usb-acm

# Plug the receiver in and find it.
ls /dev/ttyACM* /dev/ttyUSB*

# Run gpsd against it.
gpsd -n /dev/ttyACM0

# Confirm a fix before you set off.
gpspipe -w -n 10

Storage on these devices is small. Log to a USB stick or SD card rather than internal flash, or a long drive will fill the root filesystem and stop recording.

Recon scans and what they give you

The Pineapple's Recon module produces its own scan output listing BSSIDs, SSIDs, channels and signal strength. That is most of what this site needs — the missing piece is coordinates. If you have gpsd running, the cleanest route is to run Kismet on the Pineapple instead and let it do the correlation for you: 

opkg install kismet
# Then follow the Kismet guide - the configuration is the same.

The Kismet guide covers the rest.

Option 2: merge a phone GPX afterwards

If your scan has timestamps but no positions, and you recorded a GPX track on your phone over the same period, you can interpolate one into the other. The principle: for each observation, find the two track points either side of its timestamp and interpolate between them.

Ask in gear and rigs — a couple of people have scripts for this, and pooling one good script beats four mediocre ones.

Option 3: use the phone

WiGLE WiFi Wardriving on Android records BSSID, SSID, security, channel, signal and GPS position in one file, and exports a CSV this site reads without any conversion. For pure wardriving it is the lowest-effort setup that works, and there is no shame in it.

Export from the app, then upload the CSV. Both the older WigleWifi-1.4 layout and the newer one with the Frequency column are handled.

A note on what not to do

The Pineapple can do a great deal more than listen — deauthentication, evil twins, captive portals. None of that belongs in a wardrive, none of it is legal against networks you do not own, and none of it produces data this site wants. Keep the radios passive: listen, record, move on.