I used a soup can to make a cantenna to see if I could extend the range of the WiFi signal. I could only test upto 160 feet before I ran out of room indoors. Tonight its a little cold outside (-11°F).
The Core is powered by a LiPo battery via the battery shield.
I’ll post further observations soon. I encourage you guys to try this. Plenty of good tutorials out there!
This is great @mohit! Nice pics too. Just need that Spark.getRSSI(); method now to make this really fun to experiment with 
I see what you did there with the eyes and nose LEDs!
Do you think a cantenna design might work with a chip antenna if the entire Spark was put in the can?
Probably not @wgbartley as the antenna orientation and ground reference is made to the can itself… see this page for a nice diagram of the critical parameters: http://urbanwireless.info/antennas/waveguide-can-tenna
Great suggestion! I have built two cantennas using pet food cans; our dogs were happy and I was happy too. I am now receiving WiFi at a distance of about 50m from the wireless access point.
Signal strength adjacent to the access point -44dBm
Signal strength at 50m is between -60dBm and -80dBm
This is well within parameters for reliable packet transfer. I will eventually try extending it further but this will require a more precise orientation and stable fixing for the cantenna.
Sorry for the necropost, What did you come up with? I am needing to boost the signal for my photon based mailbox monitor.
