this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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It would be great if there were some open source tool kits for this. If the technology is going to exist it should be in the hands of the people.
Tadaa https://github.com/francescopace/espectre
Damn, I thought I called it 8 months ago, but that was about reading heart rates using wifi...
Yeah it's nuts. There's also https://www.tommysense.com/ which is planning individual presence detection and location tracking within rooms using an esp32 mesh, but that's closed source
Seems not for long...
MVP
Yeah, if this shit has to exist, at least let me use it for presence detection in Home Assistant without having to buy separate sensors or something!
It would be amazing to not have to deploy a network of esp32s to do it with Bluetooth.
Although I'm already putting one in each room.
Probably just need a protocol to work with the data, however it can be interfaced with. Is it just measuring signal strength via speed over time?
If you're technical you might like enjoy this article that explains how the tracking works. Basically the router can perform math on the interference created by objects moving around the room. It seems like this would have to be part of the router firmware, which doesn't sound like a standard feature. But if it is, the fix would be to install modified firmware with that function disabled. The smoking gun will be if somebody gets into DMCA trouble for doing this.
New person in room detected, please drink verification can.
that's not a sufficient fix when you are living very close to other households
A sufficient fix is not letting your wifi devices connect to your neighbor's network so their router can detect you walking between it and them.
my devices don't, but unless I misunderstood it it does not matter whether you are connected to the neighbor's router
Wifi tracking uses measurements of the interference caused when objects pass between connected devices and a router. For your neighbors to track your movements their router would have to be connected to a device in your house, or maybe in the other neighbor's house on the far side of your house, so when you walk around it interferes with that signal.
Or an open source hardware device that changes your "wifi signature" randomly.
Opensource tech to do the same thing has been in the hands of the people for a long time. This is just a different way of doing it without motion sensors.
these are not just motion sensors. these are much more accurate than that.
The motion sensing is more accurate in terms of fundamentally detecting movement, but if you're going from that to assuming it can identify who you are, no it doesn't do that. It can recognize a person as the same person it saw in the room yesterday, based on their gait and their effect on the local wifi signal, but it has no way of knowing if the pattern belongs to Old Man Wilson or Old Lady Jenkins, because there's no database tying those patterns to people's identities. And besides, the patterns are specific to that one signal environmnent anyway. It's not like a fingerprint or a facial image you could record at home and then match to someone walking around in a store, which has a different signal environment.
it cannot identify persons, but it can figure out their position and roughly what are they doing.
Exactly. It can tell that Person A just lit a cigarette and Person B is taking a shit. The possibilities are terrifying!
its bad enough, and I don't know what to say if you think this is a nothingburger