I decided to build a standalone Wi-Fi analyzer with a display, similar to the WiFi Analyzer app available on Android devices. The device provides a graphical view of nearby Wi-Fi networks, allowing users to identify congestion and overlapping channels, as well as a table view showing detailed network properties.
The hardware platform I used is the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-4.3. Despite its impressively catchy name, I would hesitate to recommend this development kit for most projects due to several notable limitations.
First, the available documentation and demo code are lacking. In my experience, much of the provided example code failed to compile or run correctly without modification.
Second, the battery implementation is problematic. While the board includes an integrated lithium battery charger, there is no way to monitor battery voltage, determine whether the device is charging or running on battery power, or even power off when connected to USB.
Third, although the device features a high-quality touchscreen, there is no practical way to control screen brightness. The display effectively has only two states: eye searingly bright or completely off.
Finally, the available I/O is very limited. Most of the ESP32’s native GPIO pins are already in use, and the onboard I/O expander is also largely occupied and cumbersome to work with.
Despite these challenges, the final result has proven useful and has already helped me optimize my home network. In the future, I hope to build a similar device with improved battery support and a more capable Wi-Fi chipset—potentially based on the ESP32-C5, which offers dual-band Wi-Fi 6, compared to the ESP32-S3’s 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 support.
