An Easy Way to Visualize Wi-Fi Traffic

What does Wi-Fi look like? With the wavelengths being far outside of the range of human vision, we can’t even imagine what seeing this radiation might be like. One thing we can be certain of, however, is that it looks nothing like the Wi-Fi display created by GitHub user C4KEW4LK. But that is by design — visualizing the full RF spectrum of Wi-Fi takes a lot of hardware and software, and C4KEW4LK wanted a much simpler solution. So, this project focuses specifically on visualizing Wi-Fi traffic.

That is a much easier problem to solve, and C4KEW4LK was able to get by with just a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 development board, a strip of NeoPixels, and a 3D-printed housing to mount it all on the wall.

There are a thousand ways to visualize traffic, but C4KEW4LK chose to assign each NeoPixel to a separate 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi channel. The ESP32 then sniffs network traffic and counts the number of packets being transmitted on each channel. Finally, the intensity of each LED’s illumination is increased as the packet count goes up.

It’s an easy build to reproduce if you’d like a visual representation of the Wi-Fi traffic in your own home. You could even upgrade to an ESP32-C5 board and monitor 5 GHz channels if you have one handy. Check out the GitHub repository for more details.

For more Wi-Fi hijinks, take a look at this project that uses Wi-Fi signals to measure your heart rate.