Hardware Questions and ideas (by a noob) regarding Streetpass

[DaniPoo]

Hi! So I've been trying to get homepass to work properly but I still cant get any streetpasses.
I dont know if this is because there is no one to comunicate with or whats the problem.
The Nintendo Zone app does appear on my homescreen. But whatever...

Not my questions are as following:
How exactly does streetpass and the Nintendo zone work?
What kind of data files are we uploading dowloading when we streetpass?

for the fun part, could I (hypothetically) manually extract this data from one 3DS and inject it into another 3DS if someone wrote a homebrew tool to do this?

If these things was possible, I imagine that setting up a database server were people upload and download these files would not be that farfetched and could be made very simple by just having a homebrew application that first uploads and downloads/installs.

Then again it might be much more complicated.

 

[Ryccardo]

Hi! So I've been trying to get homepass to work properly but I still cant get any streetpasses.
I dont know if this is because there is no one to comunicate with or whats the problem.
The Nintendo Zone app does appear on my homescreen. But whatever...

Not my questions are as following:
How exactly does streetpass and the Nintendo zone work?

Direct streetpass: Console tries to connect to a network called "Nintendo 3DS continuous scan 000" or something (which generates activity -- for this exact reason a hidden SSID is so only as long as nobody is connecting in that instant), then it starts searching, then pings again...
When two consoles manage to see each other this way (and they haven't done so in the last 8 hours), they start exchanging streetpasses!
If you're connected to a network, Streetpassing competes with Spotpassing (and that's only in standby mode), that's why it takes a lot more time to connect to friends that are visiting your home!

Through NZ: Console uploads the "outbox" of all streetpass-enabled apps, plus SSID and MAC of access point, to Nintendo server.
Server replies with (usually) the uploads of the last 6 consoles who did exactly that.
(Postbox/Swapnote are explicitly blacklisted, as so are 2 other games I don't remember)
(Unless a "streetpass event" is ongoing and the server deliberately mixes up the data sources, you only interact with previous users of that specific SSID+MAC, that's most likely why your homepass is "not working" -- it is, but only you have ever connected to that Zone)!!
Note that you can't streetpass with yourself, so if you were to find an abandoned McDonalds and be the last one to visit it, you would get 6-5-4-3-2-1-0 streetpasses as you become a higher percentage of the "last 6 users"

What kind of data files are we uploading dowloading when we streetpass?
for the fun part, could I (hypothetically) manually extract this data from one 3DS and inject it into another 3DS if someone wrote a homebrew tool to do this?

As you probably guessed by my description, there is an "outbox" that's given to other person's "inboxes", themselves having a finite capacity of "slots" (the number of streetpasses you see in system notifications) and also of bytes.

You can backup and restore "boxes" (one of the 12 slots in streetpass management, associated with a specific app, made of 1 outbox and a number of 1-99 inboxes) with the dev tool CecLotTool, which can also reset (by pressing start) the 8 hour timer!

That would probably be the first step to creating some 3rd party streetpass infrastructure.

Good Luck!!