Ispindle and WiFi booster/relay

[Nottsbeer]

Hi,
My latest brewing toy is an Ispindle . I've set it up and played with it in my house, all working perfectly. However, my brew shed is about 15m down the garden and it's failing to send any data via our WiFi. We have a garden office there as well, and a WiFi booster already in the house which works in the office, tho the signal is not great.

I'm looking for a few suggestions for boosting my WiFi so the ispindle works. If someone has overcome this issue I would love to hear which kit you use. I'm looking into other boosters/repeaters but there are quite a few, and quite a few different prices!

Many thanks.

 

[jayk34]

I had issues with my ispindle when I moved brewing stuff out to garage. I now have a WiFi ethernet plug that works well. It's a relatively old tplink power line adapter that was sitting in a drawer unused a after we upgraded our house WiFi to a mesh network to fix the areas in the house with poor signal. You plug one in close to your router into a spare electric socket and connect it with a network cable to the router. The second plug is then placed into an electric socket where you are having issues and can be accessed via WiFi or ethernet cable. All sends the data over your electricity power lines.

 

[Nottsbeer]

I had issues with my ispindle when I moved brewing stuff out to garage. I now have a WiFi ethernet plug that works well. It's a relatively old tplink power line adapter that was sitting in a drawer unused a after we upgraded our house WiFi to a mesh network to fix the areas in the house with poor signal. You plug one in close to your router into a spare electric socket and connect it with a network cable to the router. The second plug is then placed into an electric socket where you are having issues and can be accessed via WiFi or ethernet cable. All sends the data over your electricity power lines.

Excellent, thanks for your reply. I will look into these. I presume not being on the same circuit/ring won't affect how it works.

 

[jayk34]

Doesn't appear to be the case. The plug my router is plugged into is definitely on a different ring than the garage.

 

[phildo79]

You could try a spare mobile phone near the fv and turn on the hotspot. I ferment in a keg and getting a signal out is a nightmare, unless I place the keg beside the hub. But I did have some joy with the hotspot function on my old phone. Strangely, it hasn't worked yet with my new phone.

 

[Nottsbeer]

You could try a spare mobile phone near the fv and turn on the hotspot. I ferment in a keg and getting a signal out is a nightmare, unless I place the keg beside the hub. But I did have some joy with the hotspot function on my old phone. Strangely, it hasn't worked yet with my new phone.

Interesting idea. I don't have a spare phone but I do have an old tablet. I may see if it can record data from the ispindle when both are left in the shed.

 

[RoomWithABrew]

@Nottsbeer

Some other options, repurpose an old internet router from your internet provider, either connect it by cable and then use the wifi guides for this on the internet.
Or you can build a wifi repeater very easy out of a D1 mini and also add an external antenna to it. Not great speed for watching video but I can run 4 ispindels and a brewpiless thru it.
https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater and attached an external antenna to it this way How to add an external antenna to an ESP board

 

[ChrisT]

@Nottsbeer

Some other options, repurpose an old internet router from your internet provider, either connect it by cable and then use the wifi guides for this on the internet.
Or you can build a wifi repeater very easy out of a D1 mini and also add an external antenna to it. Not great speed for watching video but I can run 4 ispindels and a brewpiless thru it.
https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater and attached an external antenna to it this way How to add an external antenna to an ESP board

Now that is an interesting project, thank you for pointing that one out! I've repurposed an old router for all my brewing related gadgets, but still to wire it in permanently though.

 

[RoomWithABrew]

@ChrisT
If you can find an old router that has external aerials on it, most don't now but you might find in charity shop / scrap place. Take the aerials out they normally have 2 and then you can use one for the wifi extender.
Can even put a " parabolic reflecter " made from metal / stand on TV dish antenna to direct your wifi extender.

 

[Nottsbeer]

Doesn't appear to be the case. The plug my router is plugged into is definitely on a different ring than the garage.

Got myself a TP link set up today...made a massive difference to internet speed (gone from 7 to 60mbps) in our garden office and she'd . As my ispindle is sat in my latest brew I may have to wait a week before seeing if this helps. Either way my wife is happy as her connection for meetings should be great now. Thx for your advice.

 

[ChrisT]

@ChrisT
If you can find an old router that has external aerials on it, most don't now but you might find in charity shop / scrap place. Take the aerials out they normally have 2 and then you can use one for the wifi extender.
Can even put a " parabolic reflecter " made from metal / stand on TV dish antenna to direct your wifi extender.

The router I've repurposed is one with external aerials, but as I said I just need to get a netwrok socket fitted in my brew area. I have to crawl under our house to finish it off and it's a bit too cold to go and finish it off!

 

[RoomWithABrew]

@ChrisT

I meant " salvage " the aerials from a router if you were going to build a wifi extender, no need to do that if you have a wifi router ready to go.

 

[fgoulding]

I had similar issues with my wifi quality. So I bought a pair of cheap tp-link power line extenders on eBay that use the electricity sockets in the house as a network.

One tp box is plugged into the mains and then also into my existing router using an Ethernet cable.

The other tp box is my spare room (near where I brew) and it’s also plugged into the mains.

I then bought a cheap router (which also happens to be tp-link as well) and I plugged that into the tp extender socket using another Ethernet cable.

The last thing was to change the settings on the tp-link router in my spare room so that it was in “access point mode” which makes it a slave to your main router.

I also named it “Brewery” so that it was obvious for connecting up my iSpindel and Float devices.

It sounds more complicated than it really is but the tricky thing was synchronising the tp power line boxes to make a connection and finding out how to access the router configuration to change it to being an access point and not a stand alone WiFi router.

I’ve had this setup for 18 months now and never had an issue.