this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
72 points (97.4% liked)

Mildly Interesting

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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

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[–] cm0002 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

But...WiFi capable ESP32s have a built-in antenna tho

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah i was thinking the same thing, but maybe the wifi router is far away so they needed to increase their range?

[–] qaz 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I have a ESP32-WROOM-32U which is a model that uses an external antenna

[–] cm0002 3 points 2 weeks ago

Ahhh, I knew there were some that took an external antenna but I always thought it was in addition to an internal one lol

[–] glimse 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Real question, not snark...why did you do this?

[–] qaz 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

I don't have a WiFi antenna, except the ones in my computers. Buying a WiFi antenna online would've taken 2-3 weeks, and I wanted to quickly test how it worked.

[–] ThePantser 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Was there no jumper on board to switch the external antenna to the built in one? Many boards just have a 0 ohm resistor that you can add or remove to change the antenna.

[–] qaz 4 points 2 weeks ago

This model doesn't have an onboard antenna afaik

[–] glimse 3 points 2 weeks ago

Neat! My only criticism is that I find this a lot more than mildly interesting lol

[–] mystik 7 points 2 weeks ago

I was about to say -- you probably don't want to connect the wifi antenna plugs of two cards into each other -- that'd probably overdrive each other's receiver and damage the cards or cause other issues, unless you had an attenuator in there somewhere. But it looks like you're just using the antenna loop from the laptop into the esp32 ...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] qaz 2 points 2 weeks ago