WiSee - saw this years ago and have wanted it. Looks like ESPectre is well on the way to doing the same!!!

[candrews67]

https://www.jammer-store.com/wisee-project-seeing-through-the-wall-with-a-simple-wi-fi-router.html

https://wisee.cs.washington.edu

[francescopace]

Thank you @candrews67 for sharing this and Happy new year 🥳 🛜👻!!

WiSee was actually one of the first projects I studied before starting ESPectre. It's a foundational work in the Wi-Fi sensing field and a great source of inspiration.

CSI technology is not new — academic research has been exploring it for over a decade. However, what pushed me to create ESPectre is that I could not find an existing project that matched my vision:

Key differences between ESPectre and WiSee:

Aspect	WiSee	ESPectre
Hardware	Specialized routers, dedicated receivers	ESP32 chips (~$5-10)
Detection method	Doppler shift analysis with ML	Statistical variance analysis (MVS algorithm)
Machine Learning	Heavy reliance on trained models	No ML required — works out of the box
Gesture recognition	Yes, 9 gestures	No (motion detection only, for now)
Open Source	Research paper only	Fully open source (GPLv3)
Target users	Researchers with lab equipment	DIY enthusiasts, smart home users
Home Assistant	No	Native integration via ESPHome

My vision for ESPectre:

I am just a DIY enthusiast — I cannot compare myself to the results achieved by university research teams with dedicated funding and resources. But that's also the point: I wanted to democratize this technology and make it accessible to anyone with a $5 ESP32 and curiosity.

The project has two main goals:

1. Practical utility: Provide a reliable, privacy-respecting motion detection system for smart homes.

2. Research platform: With the Micro-ESPectre R&D platform, I hope to give researchers and students a playground to experiment with CSI algorithms without needing expensive hardware and C++ knowledge (It's written in Python, the de facto language for ML research).

My dream is to build a healthy, passionate community around this project. I believe open source is the best way to push innovation forward — many minds working together can achieve what a single person never could.

If you're interested in contributing or just experimenting, you're very welcome! Whether it's testing, documentation, algorithm improvements, sharing your use cases, or simply spreading the word on social media or blog. Every contribution matters!

[candrews67]

I think this is awesome!my HA recently crashed and I need to rebuild it all. As soon as I get it replaced one of the first things I will add will be ESPspectre!  I just wanted to share that the Wisee project of many years ago claimed to do almost the same with some firmware on a router; sadly they never released any code to the public that I could ever find so I am very excited to get a chance to work with ESPspectre thank you!