Anyone who’s read or seen The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings is probably familiar with Sting, Bilbo’s (and later, Frodo’s) sword that glows blue when an orc or goblin is nearby.

A friend of mine sent me a neat IoT project that uses Sting’s unique characteristic to instead alert you when unsecured Wi-Fi networks were available.

The project is called WarSting. It’s inspired by WarKitteh, a similar project where an outdoor cat with a sensor on his collar would walk around the neighborhood, all the while mapping out the neighborhood’s open networks.

As expected, when the sword is nearby an unsecured network, the sword will glow blue, alerting whomever wields it to the network’s existence.

Between the toy sword (retailing around $30) and the Spark Core (a sort of Wi-Fi Arduino board, sold for $39 here), the project is actually rather simple to replicate. There are full instructions at Spark’s blog with a full write-up by Zach Supalla, CEO at Spark.

You can also check out Spark’s demo video below.