WiFi wireless signal strength in panel

Source (link to git-repo or to original if based on someone elses unmodified work): Add the source-code for this project on opencode.net

Description:

WiFi Plasmoid
Please, remember to install the dataengine before (see instructions below)

This applet shows an icon representing wireless signal strength from your wlan interface. Hovered, it also displays pieces of useful information such as your IP, gateway/access point address and your essid (your wireless network name)

It is designed to live in the KDE panel, so you can hide other connection-managers icons that don't integrate very will with your KDE theme. It uses standard Oxygen icons, but you can easily change them.

Installation instructions
You first need to download the dataengine required by this script (http://bit.ly/wifi-engine), then install it using
[indent]plasmapkg -t dataengine -i wifi-engine-version.plasmoid[/indent]
Once you install the engine, you can install this plasmoid using
Add Widgets > Get new widgets > From local file
and selecting this wifi-version.plasmoid

Please, report bugs to [email protected]

jpeterse
9 years ago

Hi

Excellent plasmoid - exactly what I was looking for. Except for one small issue.
I have two WiFi interfaces in my laptop.
An old build in card, I have disabled the radio on, and a new USB interface that is the active interface.

Trouble is, in /proc/net/wireless the inactive interface is the last listed, and thus the interface monitored by pyWiFi.

If would be excellent to have configuration dialog to set the name of the interface to monitor.

It would also be great to have en option to dim the background a bit of the icon. A mainly white icon against a light grey background is hard to see.

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raffaele181188
9 years ago

Hi, thanks for the review and for pointing this out!
This script actually has a number of issues and needs a "heavy" refactor.
I think you could work around this by modifying something in the source so it doesn't get the interface form the /proc filesystem. The configuration dialog is certainly the best option, I'll update this ASAP

Also, I don't like the standard Oxygen icon, and was looking for a better way of displaying signal strength. Maybe a monochromatic carrier-like icon. What do you think?

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jpeterse
9 years ago

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, I changed the py scripts a bit to look specifically for my active interface.

I also changed some of the regex. In my laptop, the plasmoid would show
both the essid as well as the access points nick name. I changed the
RegEx to return just the access points name:
self.essid = re.search('ESSID:"(.*?)"', blob).group(1)

I also added the data rate of the connection:
self.speed = re.search('.*Bit Rate[=:](.*?/s)', blob).group(1)

For the icon, the issue is probably my own doing ;-)
I use the Air theme, which has a very light background to the system tray (where I have the pyWiFi plasmoid running). It almost makes the icon disappear against the background. Maybe the antenna should be be shade darker, and radio waves green (sort of like the standard speaker icon). But that's my personal preference - probably not one to meet consensus. ;-)

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raffaele181188
9 years ago

I developed the script while using the Air theme ;) I noticed the icon not being visible enough, so I added a dark 0.5 opaque background, but it's an ugly solution so I commented it out. You can try restoring line 64 of main.py (in plasmoid itself, not in the engine) which looks like
#painter.drawRoundedRect(myRect, 25, 25, Qt.RelativeSize)

By the way, if you know a better icon, please let me know :)
I also think the kmix icon would be perfect!! But obviuosly we can't use them

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xaxas
10 years ago

I too had issues with the dialog installer, same as DenisSeidel, his command line option worked perfectly. This plasmoid is great, I have yet to see it display "not connected", which is what I got it for, but I guess that's good.

The only complaint that I have is more of a general "no good all around wireless management programs"(seriously, why can't the icon for wpa_gui change to display connection status? It's running all the time on my computer anyway)

Anyway, this completes a feature I've been sorely missing since my complete switch from Windows. Thanks for the great work!

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DenisSeidel
10 years ago

I don't know why, but the installation using the installation-dialog doesn't work on my pc, so I had to use following command:
"plasmapkg -i wifi-1.0.plasmoid".

Maybe someone else has the same problem, so this may help.

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