About Wavey

Wavey is an open-source RF sensing system that uses WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) to observe physical environments - occupancy, motion, and presence - without cameras, wearables, or active participation from the people being sensed.

Our mission

Spatial awareness usually means installing cameras (a privacy problem), buying expensive radar or LiDAR (a cost problem), or asking people to carry phones and tags (a friction problem). Wavey takes a different path: it reads the WiFi signals that already fill our spaces and turns their tiny disturbances into useful information.

Our goal is to make spatial sensing private by design, affordable, and genuinely device-free using commodity WiFi hardware. By leveraging WiFi CSI on low-cost ESP32 nodes, Wavey enables occupancy detection, motion tracking, and behavioral inference while keeping raw signals on hardware you control.

What makes Wavey different

  • Camera-free and image-free. Wavey senses the radio environment, not your appearance, so there are no images to leak. See how this compares in WiFi sensing vs cameras .
  • Device-free. People don’t need to carry a phone, tag, or wearable to be sensed.
  • Low-cost and open. Built on ESP32-CSI and a Python pipeline, so anyone can inspect, self-host, and extend it.
  • Real-time. Sensing nodes stream CSI into a processing pipeline you can watch live in the Wavey Console .

The technology, in one paragraph

CSI describes how a WiFi signal propagates across many OFDM subcarriers - far richer than a single RSSI value. A moving body perturbs those radio paths in consistent, measurable ways, and Wavey converts those perturbations into spatial and motion information. Start with how it works , the sensing pipeline , or the glossary .

Where Wavey fits

WiFi sensing has moved from research labs to standards and commodity hardware. IEEE 802.11bf is standardizing native WiFi sensing APIs; most deployed APs already emit beamforming feedback that can reconstruct multipath without CSI firmware hacks. ESP32 nodes make CSI capture accessible at scale. Wavey sits in the open-source, deployable corner — occupancy, motion, and presence on hardware you control, with honest scope boundaries (no pose, no identity). See the detection ladder for what is feasible today vs research frontier.

Get involved

Wavey is built in the open and we’d love your help.

Questions or partnerships? See contact .