Three WiFi Meters 2020
As part of my PhD Home Network Study, I designed three meters that allowed participants to measure otherwise invisible qualities of their home WiFi networks. Each operates at a different scale and a deliberately analogue, ambiguous quality.
Much of the hardware and software design is shared between the meters. Each uses the inexpensive ESP8266 WiFi module. This is fully documented in this GitHub repository.
The Signal Strength Meter measures the signal strength of the router in different parts of the home. The display is a modified analogue gauge.
The Device Wheel watches an individual device’s use of the network. Bringing the meter close to a device will pair it. Then whenever this device uses the network the wheel will spin - clockwise for downloads, anti-clockwise for uploads. The wheel is driven by a Walkman motor.
The Traffic Monitor displays the last three minutes of the WiFi network traffic. The meter shows all the devices on the network as circles on the periphery of the dial, which flash when they are active. Lifting the paper cover reveals more detail. A Raspberry Pi Zero drives a 4-inch colour screen and reads data from the attached ESP8266 via a Processing sketch.
To simplify the WiFi configuration, and to allow the three meters to be configured in a single step, I extended the YoYoWiFiManager library that we had developed for the Yo-Yo Machines project.
The Home Network Study and the process of designing these meters is described in this paper:
The Three WiFi Meters were featured on Hackaday in 2021.