Visualizing WiFi with a Converted 3D Printer

We all know we live in a soup of electromagnetic radiation, everything from AM radio broadcasts to cosmic rays. Some of it is useful, some is a nuisance, but all of it is invisible. We know it’s there, but we have no idea what the fields look like. Unless you put something like this 3D WiFi field strength visualizer to work, of course.

Granted, based as it is on the gantry of an old 3D printer, [Neumi]’s WiFi scanner has a somewhat limited work envelope. A NodeMCU ESP32 module rides where the printer’s extruder normally resides, and scans through a series of points one centimeter apart. A received signal strength indicator (RSSI) reading is taken from the NodeMCU’s WiFi at each point, and the position and RSSI data for each point are saved to a CSV file. A couple of Python programs then digest the raw data to produce both 2D and 3D scans. The 3D scans are the most revealing — you can actually see a 12.5-cm spacing of signal strength, which corresponds to the wavelength of 2.4-GHz WiFi. The video below shows the data capture process and some of the visualizations.

While it’s still pretty cool at this scale, we’d love to see this scaled up. [Neumi] has already done a large-scale 3D visualization project, using ultrasound rather than radio waves, so he’s had some experience in this area. But perhaps a cable bot or something similar would work for a room-sized experiment. A nice touch would be using an SDR dongle to collect signal strength data, too — it would allow you to look at different parts of the spectrum.