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WebGPU-Based WiFi Simulator

(wifi-solver.com)
325 points jasmcole | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.645s | source
1. crazygringo ◴[] No.41898421[source]
This is exceptionally cool.

A while ago I was trying to find realistic examples of what WiFi "looks like", to try to get an intuitive sense of how it operated in a house or outside a building -- to what extent it spreads in the same way as a normal lightbulb, or to what extent its vastly larger wavelength complicated the picture.

At the time, literally the only visualization I was able to find was this artistic seemingly nonsense:

https://inspirationist.net/what-wifi-looks-like/

So I'm very happy to see this tool. I'd be even more curious to see a non-animated version that lets you drag your router around and see "illumination" of the overall signal to see how it changes, continuing to take into account how reflections confuse and degrade the usable signal, etc. Instead of the animation of slow wave propagation. Maybe that exists somewhere?

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2. jasmcole ◴[] No.41898441[source]
Thanks! If you navigate to one of the example simulations, you'll be able to change the instantaneous field visualisation to one of time-averaged power density, which sounds closer to what you're looking for.

The cool thing about the speed of WebGPU is that you can drag things around and watch changes in real-time, even if you have to average lots of simulation steps per rendered frame.

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3. crazygringo ◴[] No.41898519[source]
Ah yes, I've found it -- changing "Signal" from "EM field" to "Power". That is fascinating to look at.

Is there a way to move the router around to see how the field changes in response?

As far as I can tell you can do that in the paid version, and I totally understand gating that for people modeling their own home/office layout. But it would be pretty cool as a free educational demo if you could move the router in the otherwise fixed example.

4. zokier ◴[] No.41905116[source]
cnlohr did project that visualized wifi power level spatially

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqqEYz38ens