https://sensorrig.com/Recent content on SensorRig — Real Raspberry Pi Sensor MonitoringHugoen-usMon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://sensorrig.com/posts/hc12-vs-wifi-remote-sensor-nodes/Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://sensorrig.com/posts/hc12-vs-wifi-remote-sensor-nodes/Every home-monitoring tutorial assumes WiFi reaches your sensor. Mine didn’t. Two masonry walls and a steel-reinforced floor between the Pi and the pump room meant an ESP32-C3 that associated fine on the bench and dropped every 40 seconds in place. The fix was to stop fighting 2.4 GHz and drop to 433 MHz with a pair of HC-12 modules. Here’s the honest comparison after running both. The tradeoff in one table WiFi (ESP32-C3 native) HC-12 @ 433 MHz Wall penetration poor very good Throughput Mbit/s ~1–5 kbit/s usable Power per reading high (assoc + DHCP + TLS) low (UART burst) Infrastructure needed AP in range none, point-to-point Debuggability excellent painful Cost per node €0 (built in) ~€5 The headline: you trade bandwidth you don’t need for range you desperately do.https://sensorrig.com/about/Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://sensorrig.com/about/I build and run my own home data-acquisition hardware — and this site is where I write down what actually worked, what burned out, and what the datasheet failed to mention. Everything published here is measured on equipment I own and operate continuously: DS18B20 1-Wire temperature probes on long cable runs DHT11 humidity sensors (and their well-earned reputation) ESP32-C3 remote nodes linked back over HC-12 433 MHz serial radio CT clamps + ADS1115 for whole-house energy monitoring A Raspberry Pi 5 collector running asyncio → SQLite (WAL) → FastAPI → Chart.