Environment Overview
Alongside Wi-Fi metrics, Signal Vortex sensors can also read temperature, humidity, air pressure, and air quality from the physical space they're in. Two dashboard cards give you an at-a-glance read; the full Environment screen (below) is where you dig into history.
On the Dashboard
Viewing a single site, two cards appear above the access point list:
- Environment — the latest temperature, humidity, pressure, and air-quality reading from each sensor at the site. While a sensor's gas sensor is still warming up, air quality shows "calibrating…" instead of a number rather than a misleadingly precise early reading.
- Occupancy — one card per registered space (see Space Management) showing an occupancy index gauge, a Quiet/Occupied/Busy band, which input is actually driving that reading (VOC, humidity, temperature, or Wi-Fi client count), and a headcount band once the space has calibrated. A space still building up history shows "still learning" instead of a number — you'll never see a reading presented with more confidence than the system actually has. Any site-wide figure is always labelled as an average across N spaces, never shown as a single bare number.
Both cards render nothing if the site has no data for them yet — no BME680 fitted, or no spaces registered — rather than showing an empty or zeroed-out card.
The Environment screen
Reached via Environment, alongside Access Points and Clients, under a selected site in the left nav.
- A space picker and a time range picker (1H, 6H, 24H, 7D or 30D) at the top. Everything below follows these two choices.
- One card per reading, all on one page: Temperature, Humidity, Absolute Humidity, Dew Point, Pressure, Gas Resistance, Air Quality Index and VOC Trend. Each card shows the current value, the minimum and maximum for the period, and a chart. There's no need to pick one metric at a time.
- A card with nothing to show says why — for example, air quality isn't available in the first few minutes after a sensor starts — and a list of readings the sensor couldn't provide appears at the top of the screen. Missing readings are never filled in with zeros.
- The Occupancy Index card spans the full row (it shows a short "still learning" message until the space has enough history), with Wi-Fi channel airtime and weather charts side by side below it, on the same time window — so you can see, for example, whether a spike in occupancy lines up with a spike in network load.
- A site with no spaces set up gets a Default space automatically as soon as its first environmental reading arrives. When you switch sites, the screen only offers spaces that belong to the site you're viewing.
- Holidays, bridge days, and weekends are shaded on every chart on this screen in their own colour, so an unusual reading on a Tuesday doesn't get compared against a public holiday without you realizing it.
Room capacity warnings
For each room with an environmental sensor, Signal Vortex works out which of your access points serve that room, counts the clients on them, and looks at how busy their channels are, alongside how full the room is getting. If that picture says the room's Wi-Fi is about to struggle within roughly the next half hour, you'll get a Room Capacity Predicted to Suffer recommendation in your Inbox while there's still time to act.
Why it matters
A "how's the space doing" question is often about more than Wi-Fi — a hot, stuffy room affects people (and sometimes devices) independently of signal quality. Putting environmental and network data on the same time axis makes it easy to tell whether they're actually related, instead of eyeballing two separate dashboards.