I love that you immediately went to WiFi for this though. Gotta love us tech people over complicating things haha!
But it was not cheap, cost about $300.
If you just want to just find studs, use magnetic stud finder. Cost about $10. Very easy to use and accurate.
They're awful and if you don't realize they're awful then you might make regretful decisions based on their slanderous output.
That said, if you want the job actually done any time soon, stud finder sounds like a better choice for now.
The knock test shouldn't be skipped.
Metal detectors work well, but he'd have to go over each wall meticulously. That would probably take quite some time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system#Nea...
It won't show cables, unless they're hot. You can use an AC stud finder for that.
You can flip the photo between the actual and IR image, and it overlays an outline over the image.
I make a video in and out of the house on the hottest and coldest days.
I’ll definitely just get a trigger style one that’s only 3-6ft max next time.
The infriray is the Chinese knockoff brand which is actually better than flir because they don’t have to follow the US weapons law. So with it I get 30(?) fps instead of the ~5 with flir. Resolution is better too. It’s very sensitive and can clearly show a hand print on a surface for a minute or so even if you only touch it for 1/2 a second.
It has been useful to find pipes and electrical with some confidence, when their location is called for.
Amazon (in India) turned up nothing when I searched for cool attachments etc.
1) ExpEYES (Experiments for Young Engineers and Scientists) - https://expeyes.in/
2) SEELab 3.0 which is a upgrade of ExpEYES-17 - https://csparkresearch.in/seelab3
I have played with the previous version of ExpEYES (ExpEYES Junior) using the Python software. I also have the Seelab3 but haven't played with it yet. You can buy them directly (don't buy from Amazon due to markup) from any of the dealers listed in https://expeyes.in/hardware.html (i bought my Seelab3 from Novatronics).
There is a Android version of the software for both and so you can use them from your Smartphone/Tablet.
A drywall cutter is like a cast cutter; it works by vibrating and won't cut through wires, pipes, skin, ect.
If you don't want to use a stud finder, look for electrical boxes and remove the plate. That will tell you where a studs is. The rest of the studs are typically (US) 16" apart, but vary near corners and windows. You can often make an educated guess by knocking on the wall, the sound changes depending on if you knock on the stud.
I love my plaster walls but dealing with pipes/electrcial is a huge pain.
I ended up teaching myself to do a passable job with repairing plaster and being content with how it is.
if they are not in the typical 16" and your not near a corner, try 18" and 24". I'm in a house from an infamous builder in the early days of the cookie cutter developer cutting every possible corner and then finding new ones to cut, they are definitely not on 16". In fact, I doubt there was a tape measure used at any time during the build, and most things just seem to be placed by "that looks about right" measuring system.
Electrical boxes and light switches are the only ones to have faith in. Other types of boxes (like cable or phone) could have been added after the fact and just be attached to the dry wall if there's even a box.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6WHhqDHSQ4 Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABeN4uv03s
An alternative approach would be to use holographic principles, but these require you to measure very accurately the position of your transmitters, whether you use a multiplicity of them placed in different locations or employ Synthetic Aperture Radar methods with a single one (by moving your transmitter).
That is why using 60 Ghz radars (with 4 GHz of bandwidth and Angle of Arrival capabilities) at short ranges would probably be the most promising direction. You can get a dev kit for one of these from Texas Instruments or some other supplier for not too much money.
For your use case, you are primarily concerned with fireblocks. They are unlikely to exist in an older home. They can be detected with a simple stud finder, which range from $30 for the simple (good enough) kind, to $1000 for the radar kind. Simply knocking on the wall is also good for this purpose.
You likely have pretty fixed locations where you want the wires to exit into the room, so you can run a borescope through those places. These are also pretty inexpensive.
Study the building code to determine with >95% accuracy what is behind the wall based upon surrounding fixtures.
As for following - after the 50's everything was, in theory, built to code with exceptions.
Worse case really is hitting a water pipe.
Pixel 4 have SOLI 60Ghz radar chips that allows various object categorization (eventually through walls applications).
Unfortunately the radar API was never released. It's unfortunate because a smartphone already has various sensors that ideally you'd like to use to do some sensor fusion using the camera and accelerometers to determine the position of the sensor and fuse the radar information in the map, like in those 3D photogrammetry room scanning applications.
Various object categorization :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6sn2vRJXJ4
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18168083/google-project-so...
Reverse-engineered attempt have been successful (but are locked behind paywalls (since it's a 2021 paper and sci-hub doesn't download recent (>=2021) articles during its trial in india) : "Reverse Engineering the Soli Radar API for Military Applications" : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9455321/
SOLI chips are based on infineon chips https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/60GHz/
You can find some demo board using the chip :
https://www.digikey.fr/fr/videos/i/infineon-technologies/get...
The walabot referenced in other comments is an example. Based on a different chip from https://vayyar.com/technology/ https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/learn_tutorials/7/2/4/walabo...
https://www.google.com/search?q=endoscope
Good luck.
Drilling gently through wood or gypsum, you will notice immediately that you got through the sheet, before you can even hit a pipe or anything else behind. Then use that hole for the endoscopy to map out the beams and sensitives behind.
