A WiFi monitor for my house. An ESP8266 scans nearby networks and counts devices in the air every 30 seconds, then posts that to my VPS. A live dashboard shows which channels are crowded so I know when to switch my router's channel.
Day one on ArsyWatch.
The idea: an ESP8266 sits in my house and scans the WiFi around it, plus
counts how many devices are in the air. Every 30 seconds it sends that to
my VPS. Then I get a dashboard that shows which channels are crowded and
how many networks sit on each one. Mainly I want it to tell me when to
switch my router’s channel.
Barely wrote any code today. Most of it went into getting the server ready.
Installed cloudflared so I can tunnel in without opening ports, then apt
started complaining about a pending kernel upgrade. Running kernel is
7.0.0-1006-aws, the installed one is 7.0.0-1014-aws, so nothing new loads
until I reboot. I wanted the ingest endpoint running tonight and now I have
to reboot first. Not a big deal, just annoying.
One decision I did make: VPS instead of serverless. The ESP sends data
every 30 seconds and the dashboard keeps an SSE connection open the whole
time. Both want a process that stays alive, and serverless would fight me
on it.
Tomorrow: database schema, then the ingest endpoint.
