#wifiwalk

Walk your home with a Linux laptop, measure Wi-Fi in every room, and compare router positions until the worst room is good enough.

A no-dependency Python script built on iw and ping. It answers three questions:

• How good is the signal in each room? walk measures each spot you stand in.
• What actually happens when it "keeps disconnecting"? watch logs dropouts, band switches and lost pings at one spot, overnight if you like.
• What do the other devices see? router reads every wireless client's signal from an ASUS router (phones, TVs) and logs when they drop.

#Features

• Per spot: median/min signal, noise floor and SNR, link rate, channel width, Wi-Fi retry rate, beacon loss, ping loss and p95 latency to the router
• How strongly each of the router's bands (2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz) reaches that spot, from a fresh scan
• Same-channel neighbour networks (congestion)
• Plain verdicts: great / good / fair / weak / bad
• Compare surveys side by side, one per router position, ranked by the weakest room
• Dropout log with disconnects, band/BSSID switches and ping outages
• ASUSWRT client poller (app API): RSSI per device over time, joins, drops and band changes
• Everything is saved as JSON lines in ~/.local/state/wifiwalk/

#Install

Requirements: Linux, Python 3.11+, iw, ping (iputils). nmcli is optional; it triggers a fresh scan.

git clone https://github.com/Tjabooo/wifiwalk
install -Dm755 wifiwalk/wifiwalk ~/.local/bin/wifiwalk

#Usage

#1. Survey the current setup

wifiwalk walk --name router-hall
spot> kitchen
  kitchen              -52 dBm  great  on 5 GHz    1201 Mb/s  loss 0%  p95 3 ms   [router: 2.4G -41  5G -52]
spot> parents bedroom
  parents bedroom      -76 dBm  weak   on 5 GHz      86 Mb/s  loss 4%  p95 61 ms  [router: 2.4G -63  5G -76]
spot>            (empty line finishes and prints the report)

Each spot takes 15 s (--seconds). Stand where the devices are actually used: the bed, the desk, the sofa.

#2. Find out what the drops are

wifiwalk watch            # leave the laptop in the problem room; Ctrl-C prints the summary
wifiwalk router           # or from any machine: poll the router's view of every wireless device
wifiwalk router --once    # current table, weakest device first

#3. Move the router and compare

Survey again after each move, using the same spot names:

wifiwalk walk --name router-living-shelf
wifiwalk report ~/.local/state/wifiwalk/router-hall-*.jsonl ~/.local/state/wifiwalk/router-living-shelf-*.jsonl

  spot                 router-hall  router-living-s
  kitchen                -52 great        -58 great
  parents bedroom         -76 weak         -66 good
  Best placement: router-living-s (weakest spot -66 dBm, median -60 dBm).

#Reading the numbers

Signal	Verdict	In practice
≥ −60 dBm	great	anything works
−60 … −67	good	video calls and streaming are fine
−67 … −72	fair	browsing ok, calls may stutter
−72 … −78	weak	slow, drops likely
< −78	bad	expect disconnects

A good link also needs SNR above ~25 dB, ping loss under 1 % and a retry rate under ~10 %.

#Configuration

Only router needs configuration. Copy config.example.toml to ~/.config/wifiwalk/config.toml, put the admin password in the file it points to (chmod 600), or set WIFIWALK_ROUTER_PASSWORD. Without a URL it uses http://<default gateway>.

ASUS routers turn on a login captcha after failed logins; log in once in the browser to clear it.

#How it works

• iw dev IF link once a second for signal, link rate and band; iw station dump before and after for retry, packet and beacon-loss deltas; iw survey dump for the noise floor
• ping -i 0.2 to the gateway in parallel with the sampling
• nmcli device wifi rescan, then iw scan dump (no root needed) for the router's per-band signal and neighbouring networks
• router logs in to ASUSWRT's login.cgi the way the ASUS app does and polls appGet.cgi?hook=get_clientlist()

#License

MIT