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Plan your WiFi and see through walls
173 followers
Plan your WiFi and see through walls
173 followers
Free, open-source WiFi planner that runs in your browser. Drop a floorplan, place access points from 100+ real models, and see signal coverage through walls in real time. Each wall material has realistic RF attenuation. Glass, brick, concrete all behave differently. Channels are assigned automatically, and a 3-stage optimizer finds ideal AP placement. No account, no install, no subscription.
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Ok this is one of those tools I didn't know I needed until now. The realistic wall material attenuation is what makes this actually useful vs just guessing where to put access points. Does the 3-stage optimizer account for expected device density? Like a conference room with 20 people on video calls vs a hallway nobody sits in?
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@yotam_dahan Thanks! The optimizer currently maximizes signal coverage across the building interior. It treats every point equally and doesn't account for device density or expected load per zone yet.
That's a great feature idea though. The throughput model already estimates per-AP Mbps based on co-channel contention, so weighting zones by expected client count is a natural next step. Would let you bias coverage toward the conference room and away from the hallway.
Adding it to the roadmap.
This is actually really slick.
I’ve run a decent number of site surveys, and having something lightweight like this in the browser is a big win compared to traditional tools.
How accurate have you found the attenuation modeling across different materials?
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@tezdevs Thanks. The dB values are from IEEE and ITU indoor propagation references. Drywall at 3 dB, glass at 2 dB, brick at 8 dB, concrete at 12 dB, metal at 20 dB. These are per-wall-crossing values, so a ray that passes through two concrete walls sees 24 dB of loss.
In practice it gets you in the right ballpark for planning. The signal model uses an inverse quartic path loss (n=4) which is typical for furnished indoor spaces. Combined with the per-material wall losses, the heatmap matches what you'd see on a real site survey reasonably well.
Where it falls short is multipath, furniture, and ceiling height. It's a 2D ray model, not a full 3D propagation simulation. But for "where should I put my APs and which walls are killing my signal," it does the job without hauling out a spectrum analyzer.
I have this robo vacuum at my home and I also really don't understand why in some areas it doesn't get the Wi-Fi access. Having this loaded onto the system would really help me plan out those and also how to position my Wi-Fi. Having it open source is ready to add on. Thank you for this, Sean
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@nayan_surya98 That's a great use case. IoT devices like robot vacuums are usually on 2.4 GHz with weak antennas, so they're the first to drop out in dead zones. If you draw your floorplan and place your router, the heatmap will show you exactly where the signal dies and whether it's a wall or just distance. Hope it helps!
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Really nice idea, especially the real-time interference visualization. How do you handle more complex layouts like multi-floor homes or offices?
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@uxpinjack Thanks! Right now it's single-floor only. Each floor would be a separate project. Multi-floor support where you can model inter-floor attenuation (signal bleeding through ceilings) is on the roadmap. The signal model already handles per-material dB loss, so adding a floor/ceiling material type is the natural extension.
Really handy!! Have users discovered any issues in their setup that they wouldn’t have noticed otherwise??
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@lak7 Yeah, the most common one is co-channel interference. People put two APs on the same channel without realizing their coverage areas overlap. The solver catches that immediately and assigns non-conflicting channels.
The other big one is walls people underestimate. A single concrete wall can cut your signal by 12 dB, which is roughly a 75% reduction in throughput. The heatmap makes that obvious in a way that "my WiFi is slow in the bedroom" never does.
@seanreid that's really cool! Will definitely try it out to see any problem in my setup!
Going to test it! Looks great!
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@antoninkus Thanks, let me know how it goes!