The author, David G. Simmons, was unable to find a Telegraf plugin for monitoring wireless interfaces on his Pine-64 box, so he wrote one himself. The original output from `/proc/net/wireless` had a two-line header that made it difficult to parse, but the author's custom plugin transformed the data into InfluxDB-friendly values. To make the data accessible to Mac users, the author found a similar way to retrieve wireless information using the `airport` command on Mac OS, which resulted in more readable output. The author created two custom plugins for Telegraf and Chronograf to monitor wireless interfaces, one for Linux and another for Mac, allowing them to track the health and activity of wireless interfaces, particularly important for IoT gateway devices that rely on wireless connections.