Lee's Sandwiches in Milpitas has something like this. They give you a code good on the receipt which is good for 15 minutes on their thin clients. However the system is usually not operational.
I think that 5 minutes per dollar spent, would be fair.
Technology to the rescue.
One of the weirder applications of RFID was to be controlling a hot spot useage. The RFID chip gets imbedded in the coffee cup and contains some kind of magic cookie. The customer registers when they buy the coffee, which gives them xx minutes of Wi-Fi use. When they go for refills, the pass the coffee cup near some kind of reader which renews the usage limit. As long as they're in the shop guzzling coffee, their wi-fi connection stays alive. When done, they just toss the coffee cup. I haven't seen anyone actually doing this, or selling the technology, but it is possible.
The free Windoze version of Ntop is limited to capturing 1000 packets. To get full functionality under Windoze, you must either compile your own from source, or contribute 50 Euros to the development effort.
A nice interface to see the traffic, assuming a hub or switch with port mirroring would be NTOP .
If you set it to show only current connections you can get a good picture of traffic and clients.
John
Sure. I use NTOP on various Linux mutations all the time. It's free and works nicely. Only the Windoze version costs money.
I've also tried to build it under Cygwin, but couldn't make it play. However, that was a while ago and things may have changed. Nothing in the ported packages pile.
Yes you have to pay for support for Windows Binary, but another option would be to use a Knoppix based distro that has ntop on it
John
Following up yet again but another graphical monitor that could be very useful in this situation is
Binaries and source availible for Linux
John
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.