https://sensorrig.com/tags/hc-12/Recent content in Hc-12 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.