MF60

A library and command-line utility to control the MF60 portable hotspot device.

The MF60 is a portable, personal WIFI hotspot that is sold worldwide in countries like Australia and Switzerland. It makes a 3G or 2G connection available over WIFI to several devices, and has it's own batter power (well, just a few hours without help from USB). Apparently, over a million of these devices were sold in Australia alone last year.

Installation

$ gem install mf60
$ mf60 --help

Command-line Utility

A command-line utility gets installed with the gem, called mf60. Before using it, set the admin interface password via an environment variable:

$ export MF60PW="secret"

or

$ MF60PW="secret" mf60 status

There are just a few tasks supported for now:

$ mf60
Tasks:
  mf60 connect      # Connect to the cellular network
  mf60 disconnect   # Disconnect from the cellular network
  mf60 help [TASK]  # Describe available tasks or one specific task
  mf60 reset        # Reset the WAN connection
  mf60 stats        # Get statistics and usage info
  mf60 status       # Display connection status and signal strength

mf60 reset is handy and quick for those times when you pass through a tunnel and it has trouble reconnecting on the other side.

Tracking signal strength can be interesting as well:

$ mf60 status
MF60 Current Status
-------------------
Provider     : Swisscom
Network Type : UMTS
Device State : modem_init_complete
rscp/ecio    : 176/16
rssi         : 11
signal       : ▁ ▂ ▃......

The signal meter is probably not that accurate (needs tweaking) and doesn't work at all when on GPRS (2G).

You can also check your download/upload usage with mf60 stats, in case you have a monthly limit (as I do):

$ mf60 stats
MF60 Current Statistics
-----------------------
Connect Time : 36:24
Transmitted  : 268K
Received     : 45M
Total Recv   : 212M

Note: When you are logged into the admin interface from a browser, you will be logged out as soon as you connect with this library. That's just the way it goes.

Library

By default, the library attempts to connect to the device's web admin interface at http://192.168.0.1/. You can change the address with an environment variable,MF60URL:

$ export MF60URL="http://swisscom-mf60.home"

or, in an app:

# ENV['MF60URL'] = "http://192.168.1.1"

There's just one class to use, MF60::Client:

> require 'MF60'
> mf60 = MF60::Client.new('admin', 'secret')
> mf60.reset
=> true

Statistics and status are returned as a hash:

> mf60.stats
=> {:current_trans=>1133211, :current_recv=>2884959, :connect_time=>"29:33", :total_recv=>222000830}

See the command-line utility source for descriptions of the keys.

About

Like most hotspots, it comes with a pretty pitiful web interface and not much in the way of an API. I commute on the train frequently, and I sometimes find I need to reset the box. I was curious to see if I could somehow automate that a little bit. For instance, I wanted to be able to quickly disconnect/reconnect from the command-line, or maybe gather statistics. So I wrote this library.

There's no official published protocol for this device that I know of. Firebug and Firefox were used to inspect and reverse engineer the web admin interface of the device. I have the Swisscom MF60 from ZTE, but other carriers and devices may be compatible. Let me know.

I hope to soon write a stats-gathering script so I can graph signal strength along different train lines.

The project is built with HTTParty and Thor. Both libraries were fun and awesome to use.