this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month 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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

This model doesn't have an onboard antenna afaik

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month 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 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago