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Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

blog.ui.com

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#31

I don’t know anything about this company (which people seem to not like), but SLAM for WiFi is looks pretty cool (and even somewhat useful).

> I don’t know anything about this company (which people seem to not like)

Huh? Ubiquiti is one of the more popular companies for networking equiment mostly due to their pretty good WiFi equipment which gives good performance/range for relatively affordable prices.

Please don't build sentiment on loud HN hecklers - for every good product you'll see a bunch of complainers coming out of the woodwork on this site. It's pretty much a rule now that all top-level comments must be heckling on whatever horrendous crime a company did to some person.

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few basic, long-promised, high-demand features they need to spend time on first, before introducing an additional half-baked feature. If it's anything like the dashboard it'll be lots of pretty without the simple tweaks needed to actually make it useful.

> There are quite a few basic, long-promised, high-demand features they need to spend time on first, before introducing an additional half-baked feature. I'm sure those are all features "noone needs" just like "noone needs" (quiting OP of this thread) a good tool to debug WiFi deadzones when deploying prosumer equipment like UniFi APs.

Well I needed to disable NAT on my Unifi Dream Machine Pro. Not possible. In the end I sold it and got myself proper hardware.

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#34

The app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubnt.usurv... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ubiquiti-wifiman/id1385561119

Worth noting that the iOS app does not do any of these things. It has a speed test function, a ping function, and that’s all. ubiquiti have a tendency to ship stuff very undercooked - I’ve had no statistics on my hub for months now, as they shipped with dependencies on a version of mongodb that hasn’t been released yet. Still unpatched. They immediately knew what the issue was when I reported it - quality just doesn’…

iOS blocks access to the wifi info needed as I remember, it's why you don't really see any wifi scanner apps on it.

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#35
This was actually quite interesting to use - walking around my apartment I could see when and where handoff was happening between APs. That was really useful as there some places I assumed that devices would use AP X, but they were using AP Y instead (...or at least my phone did). Seemed to work with all brands/manufacturers of AP.

Sure there are ways to do this with other tools, but this tied it together in a nice useful way.

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#37
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that the iOS app does not do any of these things. It has a speed test function, a ping function, and that’s all. ubiquiti have a tendency to ship stuff very undercooked - I’ve had no statistics on my hub for months now, as they shipped with dependencies on a version of mongodb that hasn’t been released yet. Still unpatched. They immediately knew what the issue was when I reported it - quality just doesn’…

I would claim that the iOS version might not be capable of doing the tricks due to the restrictions of the platform. Their Augmented reality functions for Switch Ports only works on iOS. That or the teams are really bad at syncing their work.

There are the APIs in iOS to do this (Apple80211.framework) but it is a private API and any app that uses it will not get accepted to the App Store.

Edit: It looks like Apple’s done some switching around since I last hacked on it but this page is helpful: http://newosxbook.com/articles/11208ellpA-II.html

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#38
post #7

Great. More things no one needs. Please, Ubiquiti, work on your existing products. Your forums and reddit are full of frustrated customers with unresolved bugs and issues.

I disagree that no one needs it; this would have been very helpful when I was trying to troubleshoot my AP’s dead zones. Agree on the rest

There are plenty of existing Wi-Fi analyzer / scanner tools out there. I don't see how this signal-strength map function is more helpful than the signal strength meter those have, particularly the audible (beeping) indicators which will you don't even need to keep an eye on.

Re: Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

#39
post #36

Looks cool, too bad it’s from a company that’s untouchable. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/whistleblower-ubiquiti-b...

Don't go near anyone's cloud. But the hardware is super solid.

And their cloud is no longer avoidable.
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