The Three WiFi Meters are:

  • A Signal Strength Meter, which measures the signal strength of your router around the house. The analogue meter continuously displays the WiFi signal strength (RSSI).
  • A Device Wheel, which watches an individual device's use of your network. Pair a device by bringing it in proximity and the wheel will spin whenever there is network activity - clockwise for downloads, anti-clockwise for uploads.
  • A Traffic Monitor, which shows the traffic on your home WiFi network. See the total volume of data every second over the past three minutes.

Each is built on the ESP8266 (or ESP32) using the Approximate and YoYoWiFiManager Arduino libraries. The Approximate library allows you to easily discover a close-by WiFi device (used by the Device Wheel) and then watch the traffic to devices (used by the Device Wheel and the Traffic Monitor). The YoYoWiFiManager allows all three meters to be configured at once via a single captive portal; it automatically forms a peer network and distributes the credentials.

These meters work with 2.4GHz WiFi networks, but not 5GHz networks - as neither ESP8266 or ESP32 support this technology.

The Three WiFi Meters are inspired by multiple sources, not least Natalie Jeremijenko's Live Wire (also known as Dangling String) (Weiser and Brown, 1995) and the Tangible Media Group's Pinwheels (Dahley, Wisneski and Ishii, 1998).

Full technical details of the project are availble at: https://github.com/davidchatting/ThreeWiFiMeters