I am also super interested for the personal use case. What is the resolution? Can I track my cat through the house? See when they go to the feeder? Count my own bathroom visits?

> What is the resolution? Can I track my cat through the house? See when they go to the feeder? Count my own bathroom visits?

None of the above.

The setup process has you select 3 reference devices. You should pick the devices so that your normal motion areas are between the device and the router.

The router then watches the WiFi signals from those devices. If they fluctuate more than baseline, it's assumed that something is moving around in the area.

It's a threshold detection that can serve as a crude motion sensor for home/away purposes.

For home / away purposes it's easier to just detect if your phone is connected to the network. I built something like that before by shipping the log from my UniFi controller to a RPi and listen for events where my phone's MAC address connect or disconnnect.

This doesn't really tell you if someone without your wifi password is rummaging through your house while you're not there. Also wifi is not the right tool for this lol

> Also wifi is not the right tool for this lol

Why? It's already there and reliable.

Nuts. Less interesting than the claims of monitoring heart rate, but still potentially some applications “for free” if it just needs to analyze signal strength from devices I already have. Theoretically could put it directly onto my OpenWRT router and make it available from there.

Just get cameras and local storage/processing for them. No need for elaborate Wi-Fi presence detection hacks.

This is hacker news, of course there is a need

Presence detection without the possibility of images being captured seems a reasonable application to me. So much the better if I could do it with hardware I already have versus installing motion detectors or other sensors.

RF human detection sensors ((that can even tell you the heart rate of someone in the room (if its below 120 I think)), cost almost nothing. Or at least they did before tariffs .

They can also be programmed to detect people on the floor, so if you have elderly in your house you can know if someone fell, without cameras. They are made for hospitals but are cheap, but not 100% accurate for HR and falls, but reliable enough for security, and cheap.

RF would have to be placed in each room, no? And would require wiring or be battery powered.

Wifi is something most people already have available, and requires no new wiring or battery management. That's the selling point.

Check out ESP32-based projects like ESP32-CSI-Tool or the FreqSense library, which can implement WiFi sensing with minimal hardware and completely under your control.

>Check out ESP32-based projects like ESP32-CSI-Tool or the FreqSense library

Interesting, mind sharing links to these?

I just don't get these comments, it literally takes longer to type out a reply versus just highlighting the text and right click to search. Truly baffling.

Sorry, I should have clarified (I would normally agree with you here).

I found a GitHub repo for "ESP32-CSI-Tool" that seems related to Wi-Fi Sensing, but zero references to "FreqSense" in the Wi-Fi/RF context.

The only FreqSense I found is an obscure academic paper on speech recognition that doesn't involve any form of hardware.

This would be cool as a cheap "is someone home" sensor for Home Assistant.