Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal | Hacker News Reader

Dynamic visualization of your WiFi signal

blog.ui.com

145 pointslibaznezba36 comments

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 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.

Would WifiAnalyzer help you troubleshoot your dead zones? https://f-droid.org/fr/packages/com.vrem.wifianalyzer/

It has visualizations for which channels are used by which surrounding Wifi network and their strengths.

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.

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’t matter to them though.

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.

This is the case.

The iOS APIs to obtain details about the current WiFi network environment are extremely limited. I suppose it’s because ad networks were using these to fingerprint the user or obtain their location using WiFi access points as a proxy for it.

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

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.

I'm pretty happy with Ubiquity's hardware, but if it has anything to do with their cloud based software it's gonna be a hard pass due to the increased security risk. It's a shame too, since cloud based services make device admin so convenient.

> It's a shame too, since cloud based services make device admin so convenient.

I don’t see how cloud services could make anything easier than just sticking a Linux box with their controller in a rack or closet. It’s your own cloud.

Also if you lose connectivity during a disaster, you're effed.

Sure you wouldn't have internet, but you would have a local network that would still work, and could still be administered.

I believe that this is not a problem with UniFi. It should save your credentials locally. And you always have the option to log in via a local IP address rather than ui.com

A second local based login actually. But yes, the network works locally.

This completely disregards the software aspect which arguably is the most value in a cloud-based management service.

More pretty marketing gimmicks. Fix the god awful software and get your security in order and maybe I'll reconsider Ubiquiti in a few years.

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.

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.

Why does this require Android 9 or higher?

I'm not related to this project, but I am an Android dev, and I would guess it has to do with the WiFi changes detailed here: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/pie/android-9.0...

Google often changes the permissions/allowed access/APIs to potentially sensitive device data, and frowns upon/bans using old APIs.

Probably the app was built with permissions changes in mind and perhaps had to set that specific minimum version. It is possible for some things to have the new API but run on an older version, through support libraries, but not everything is supported that way.

Ironically those changes are why I'm still on Android 8.1.

Considering that this is pretty novel, I’d guess that Android v9 offers some APIs that aren’t available in earlier versions.

Either way supporting something that was released 3 years ago (and available to devices bought up to 5 years ago) feels very much reasonable for a new product.

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).

Same. I'm seeing a lot of criticism here but their WiFi mapper looks amazing!

> 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.

Wow lots of haters here. I love their products. I, for one, don’t have that time or energy to build or manually maintain my own home grown networking gear. So having something that works flawlessly for me nearly all the time is very valuable.

The hate is because most felt like you at one point, and loved, and want to love, the products.

Then one day you try to change a simple setting, and realize it'll take ssh and scripts and half a day of tinkering to make a non-persistent change that Linksys/Netgear/whoever does off the shelf, and dd-wrt could do a decade ago.

Or add an additional device, or run the software update, or have a UPS kick on, and everything suddenly breaks.

Also, it doesn't always work flawlessly. Have had hardware issues on probably 1/4 of the devices over 3~4 years of use.

Then there's the phone-home "feature" they slipped in a software update without mention or a way to disable without manually rolling back updates on every device.

That said, I'm still using it. I bought a separate firewall device and run old firmware, but I still use it.

That is the point. They have the holy grail of customer emotions attached to them: love/hate.

With a little bit of focus on quality they could have propelled themselves to yet another level. When you built a house or setup a small biz, they are the ones: good hardware, no subscription, beautiful and - with focus - quality.

Please tell me the video processing is done server side :)

nice, has lots of other features like detecting low energy bluetooth and audio to tell you if you're getting closer or farther away

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