Can I solder a wifi antenna to the V3 Standard?

Troubleshooting
1

I’m leaving for BM soon and this will be my first year using the PixelBlaze on playa. My plan is to have my art car in “leader” mode and myself and my friends will be in “follower” mode to sync patterns. I thought it would be cool to send patterns to my friends as a form of communication. For example, if I have to pee my plan is to send out a yellow waterfall pattern, if I want to go to a different stage, some kind of pink swirling pattern, if the situation is urgent, a red flashing pattern. I imagine with the built-in antenna, the PixelBlaze probably has a wifi range of about 100 feet, maybe less at BM due to how “noisy” the environment is.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to solder on an external antenna to get a range boost? I found this page which shows how to do it on a normal esp32, but I’m not sure if that would work on a PB. Any ideas are appreciated!

2

I guess everybody is already at Burning Man hahaha.
Try this: External antenna - connection points? - #4 by mnielsen

It seems pretty tricky but that might work.
It would be great to be able to connect an antenna or buy a PB version with a proper antenna: I’m using it in a metal enclosure and it’s ruining my wifi signal, even a few meters away…

3

Ah ok cool! The V2 looks a bit different than the V3 though… Looking at the top part of the CPU of the V3, my guess would be that these two leads correspond to the antenna. Might have to get a sacrificial PB to test it out.

image
image842×725 55 KB