Hello,
I am involved in a project where we require an Arduino connected directly to a home wifi router, to be able to tell if any users are currently connected to that router.
Basically our goal is to have the Arduino perform simple operations whenever a user connects/disconnects to the home wifi network.
How difficult would this be to achieve for someone with limited programming/electronics experience?
Thanks
That will be difficult.
A router will not contain information about users that log on to a computer that is connected to a network, but only computers/devices that have been connected to the network. A router will have information about the IP addresses that have been provided to those computers/devices and how long these addresses stay valid. Depending on the router it will show (or not show) whether these computers are currently active (e.g. switched on).
IF a computer would be used by a single user only AND is switched on ONLY when user is using it (switched off otherwise), Linux/windows have utilities (like nmap) to display the computers/devices currently active. I don’t know about a similar utility on the Arduino.
For a wifi-router connected Arduino solution the ESP8266 (Sparkfun’s Thing or various other modules) would be the best solution. It can be programmed in Arduino and has Wifi built in. But programming network code yourself is not suited for a beginner.