nuschpl
commented
10 months ago While we can probably agree open solutions are better than DRMs and propretory code, devices RF frontends are closed and certified for a reason - the RF specturm has dedicated part for communication which is WiFi and dedicated for the radars. So while there are whitepapers which already made concept you described real and it's good for allowing the scienice go forward IMHO its not good idea to such feature generally available for script kiddies on general purpose Wifi/BT chip. As the cost of your joy would be your neighbour not able to realiably connect VPN . I doubt Espressif would involve having in mind RF device certification process
dgoss01
Huzzla101
Harvie
Hello, maybe you are familiar with doppler "radar" modules for detecting motion using RF energy reflected by human body back to detector. Like the famous RCWL-0516 (using ~3.2GHz band):
I am quite sure that something very similar can be achieved with 2.4GHz frontend of ESP32 chip. Eg.: transmitting some short RF signal (eg. esp-now packets) and measuring the reflected frequency for doppler shift.
That way you can detect if there is some motion near the ESP32 chip (and possibly measuring distance of the moving human/object to artificialy limit the range of motion detection).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283649280_A_real-time_high_resolution_passive_WiFi_Doppler-radar_and_its_applications
Do you thing there are chances that espressif will look into this topic? I believe that espressif engineers would do best job implementing such feature, since they already have knowledge of inner workings of the RF frontend hardware.