Introduction: Smart Router With WiFi Connection Visualization

By Seeed
About: Howdy, we are application engineers in Seeed. Sharing projects with the maker community is awesome. Hope you like it XD Seeed is the IoT hardware enabler providing services that empower IoT developers to swift…

Here share my latest project, a router with acrylic shell and some leds.

This router has the below functions:

  • Let you know how many devices had connected to your router
  • Show you the real-time net speed by different color of the leds

If you like this router, please follow the below steps.

Cheers.

And thanks @Fiernocht and the other guys provide the ideas to protect your router, really useful

  1. password protect it
  2. set it to the highest encryption your devices can handle ie WPA2 and AES encryption.
  3. Ban any unauthroized MAC addresses on connection
  4. and final, Hide your SSID, by default it broadcasts to everyone

We made a new version of Router at 17 June, click to view ReRouter - Make an Extensible IoT Router

Step 1: What Do We Need

Step 2: The Drawing and Laser Cutting

I did some work on structures just as the picture shows. It’s made up of 3mm matte black acrylic board. My friend Xu from seeed help me cutting the board. I guess you don’t have a laser cutting at home, but still you can download the file and find some local hacker spaces to cut it. If there's no hacker space nearby, you can try the Laser Cutting Service supply by Seeed.

You can download my drawing shown as below by click here.

laser cutting

Now, you’ll need one piece of matte black acrylic (3mm 40cm*60cm), and cut the acrylic according by the drawing that you have already downloaded.

Step 3: Modules Connect

Prepare the cutting acrylic sheet and the circuit modules as the picture shows here.

The hardware connection and case assembly are quite simple.

Firstly lets fix the Arduino Breakout for LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo board to the acrylic board with screws and nuts. The Grove Led Strip is connected to the D6 port on the breakout board.

Then, insert LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo board to the Arduino Breakout board, finish the assembly of the router box as instructed in the following pictures.

Step 4: Set Up MT7688

Now, we should do some software work, if this is your first time to use MT7688, please put hand on http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/LinkIt_Smart_7688_Duo to get started.

If you are quite familiar with LinkItSmart 7688 already, please go to the MT7688 terminal by SSH or Serial.

  • Modify the configure file to change MT7688 Duo into router mode.
vi /etc/config/network
config interface 'lan'
option proto 'static'
option netmask '255.255.255.0'
option ipaddr '192.168.100.1'
config interface 'wan'
option ifname 'eth0'
option proto 'dhcp'

  • Enable yunbridge
> uci set yunbridge.config.disabled='0'<br>
> uci commit
  • set startup script
> chmod +x script/netDetermineBox
> cp script/netDetermineBox /etc/init.d/
> /etc/init.d/netDetermineBox enable
> /etc/init.d/netDetermineBox start &
> reboot

Step 5: Using Arduino IDE to Upload Arduino Sketch

  • Download demo code at https://github.com/Lee-Kevin/MT7688_Demo/tree/mas...
  • Click “Download zip” button on right side of webpage to download all codes.
  • Unzip the downloaded zip files to“C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Arduino\” and remove “-master” in unzipped file name.
  • Launch Arduino IDE.
  • Click Sketch>Add file to add routerBox_Arduino.ino file from“C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Arduino\MT7688_Demo\mt7688routerBox\”
  • Press CTRL +U to upload codes to your board. Wait for a while until you see a prompt like following figure:

Now congratulations, you have just made an incredibly awesome DIY network router for yourself.

Step 6: ​The Result

Now，Power up the router, and access it to the network. Let your device connect to the “LinkIt_Smart _7688_xxxxxx”, and you’ll find the Green LED is light up