My partner is always interested in health-related tech, and our conversations often drift in that direction. So one day we ended up talking about how much WiFi is actually around us. We'd had this kind of conversation before, but this time it sparked something deeper — I wanted to investigate and build something that could make it visible. A little gadget that just sits on the desk.
I thought, why download an app when I have an ESP32 lying around? So I started prototyping. The idea was simple: something I could see and carry around the house.
It might sound a bit silly to some, but I genuinely wanted to know where the "WiFi quiet zone" was — the spot with the least exposure. Not making any claims about healthy or unhealthy, just curiosity. We live on an estate surrounded by houses, so it's not just our router — it's all the neighbours' routers as well.
The first prototype was working the next day. Very primitive code, wired up in a rush with jumper wires. But it worked. And finding out that our daughter's bedroom had the lowest WiFi exposure of any room in the house — that was a genuinely cool thing to know.
Weeks went by. Then one evening, out of boredom, I improved the code and rewired it with single-core wire to make it more stable. A few weeks after that, same story — had some time, got restless, and thought: why not design a proper PCB? So I did. And now it's a soldered, functioning little board.
But the story doesn't end there. While writing the documentation, it hit me — this thing is more universal than I'd realised. Swap the firmware and it can display anything: temperature, sensor data, whatever you feed it. So this isn't the end of the story. It's the beginning.
1 / 2 • The PCB and fully assembled Spectrum One.
If anyone would like to have a deeper look, the book is free to download on my website. https://currenari.com/spectrum-one/
Comments