ESP32 Cam External Antenna Mod
I am now working on building my own Mayhem board for Flipper Zero, so the first thing was to do some testing with ESP32 Cam module. The range of the internal antenna wasn’t great, so it’s time to hookup an external antenna. Thankfully, the process is well documented by Random Nerd Tutorials.
We will need to desolder a zero ohm resistor and move it to a different position, and resolder it in place, as shown in the image below (taken from the above tutorial).
Here’s a close up of how it looks like on my ESP32 Cam module.
I just used my soldering iron to melt the solder joints and pushed that resistor aside. That resistor is crazy tiny and I had to use a magnifying glass to do this. After removing it, I just applied some flux on the joints for the external antenna and just soldered across them to connect them. You don’t need to use the resistor and trying to solder that back in place was a major pain. I know, I tried … lol
Anyway, my testing shows that using the external antenna, Marauder was able to find 4x more access points than using the internal antenna. Success!
If you wish to learn more about ESP32 Cam, check out this article.
