I setup a LED strip around a small water pond in my backyard.
The LED and controller are 10 meters from my wireless router.
The router has a good view of the backyard.
My phone has no issues getting signal 30+ meters away (much farther than where the controller is placed).
As everything is outdoors, I placed the board in a small plastic electrical box, and the electrical box is placed inside an additional hermetically (water tight) sealed plastic container along with the power supply and all the necessary wires (there is a small hole where the wires can exit and there is a rubber seal to prevent water from entering).
Problem is that nearly always, I am not able to connect to the device over wifi (wled.local).
I Googled what the wifi distance should accommodate, and read reports of 1km !? (seems impossible to me )
but at least 10 meters should be ok no?
As I will rarely change any configurations, I have no problem with standing near the device when I want to change any configurations, so I tried to configure the wled access point rather then connecting over my local wifi network.
That being said, it still doesnât work (creating the access point).
1.If anybody has experience with this specific board, what distance should it reliably be able to connect?
2. Is it possible to âamplifyâ the connection through software?
3. Can I control wled without connecting over local wifi network and use the wled access point?
I would switch to a controller with an External antenna like an Esp8266 Pro or an Esp32 with external antenna.
If you choose the Esp8266 Pro you will need some decent soldering skills as to use the ext ant you need to remove a zero Ohm resistor and reattach it connected to different pins, or you can break the ceramic antenna off and just solder a wire from its first pad to the other pin where the resistor needed to be relocated to.
The easy route and my preferred way would be to use an Esp32 with ext ant. I also feel like the Esp32âs have a greater wifi range.
Very confusing and possibly wrong. Definitely the hard way.
There are many ESP modules with an external antenna connector on them. The NodeMCU pro and the Wemos D1 Pro come to mind. However, they are always shipped with a jumper connecting the internal antenna. Itâs a safety thing because powering the ESP without an antenna could damage the RF section of the chip.
If you have such a board, you need to move the zero-ohm jumper from the internal antenna to the external connection. But, and hereâs the easy way, you donât have to resolder the zero-ohm resistor. Just put a solder bridge between the pads. Itâs still zero ohms.
Modifying an existing board will not work more often than it will because at 2.4 GHz, one or two mm of misplaced wire can change the impedance of the antenna so much that the RF section will be mismatched and reduce the performance.
I call tell you 100% that breaking off the ceramic ant and soldering a wire from itâs first pad over to the external pad works. While this may not be the âright wayâ, it for sure works. Does it have as much signal strength as one where you moved the resistor? I donât know. What I do know is that it sure has a lot more strength vs the onboard Ant whether it be an onboard wire ant or the ceramic.
Most people would not have the soldering skill to remove that flea sized 0 ohm resistor and reposition it (nor a soldering iron with a small enough tip). Even doing the wire mod can be challenging as it is easy to pull the traces right off the board. I was giving the person all of their options.
Being that they were already using a full size NodeMCU Esp8266, I would have to guess the OP has chosen the easy route and bought the Esp32 that I linked that ONLY had an Ext Ant port (The one I described as the easiest option). Though I did provide them with a full set op options.
To further depict this I am providing pix of the 2 as well as an Esp32-Cam board that would have also required relocating the jumper. I chose not to mention that option as itâs pads are MUCH smaller and harder to deal with vs the Esp8266 Pro. As seen with the size refâ from the pencil head in the pix.
Esp8266 Pro with wire mod that is hard to see as the wire has been hot glued to keep it from moving. Ceramic ant is disconnected. You canât tell in the pic.
I bought this esp32 board per the comments through Ali-Express (Amazon shipping is to expensive for such a small thing to my location). Just choose the one with most stars and sold.
Hoping this will do the trick for my trivial needs. I donât want to invest too much time and money into this game itâs just a hobby - trying to light up my Koi pond with some ascetic lighting effects.
That board should work. No need to connect the camera to it. You may need a higher dbi antenna vs the one it comes with, but you can determine that after you try it. It it connects and works ok. Then just stick with it, if not then get a bigger antenna like an 8dbi or something. Just make sure itâs connection matches that one. in the Pic it looks to be a Male connection.
Note: To use the external antenna (my last pic in my previous post) on that board you will need to relocate that 0 ohm resistor from itâs current position to the position marked with the green line. You could just remove the resistor and connect the 2 pads that are on the green line with solder.
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