Indoor tracking and positioning solutions have gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Especially in the context of smart buildings and offices. Of course, since GPS is not available for this type of tracking, most solutions are based on WiFi, Bluetooth, and RFID.

This type of tracking in the workspace allows businesses to increase worker safety and to optimize asset management.

One of the most common problems in this type of system is that it requires active involvement from the subjects. And let’s be honest, most people don’t want to bother with this while they’re at work.

That’s why Daniele Mazzei, Head of System Integration at Zerynth, prototyped a non-invasive system that can give community managers data and insights.

He documented everything in his latest Medium article, which you can read here.

ESP32 based WiFi sniffer

“So, we built a lightweight WiFi sniffer using a cheap microcontroller development board based on the ESP32 chip, that has been programmed in Zerynth.

For 11 days 10 devices have been placed in a business center in Pisa, to understand the behavior of the 7 companies, distributed over the 2 floors of the building.” says Daniele in his article.

He then goes on to explain how he captured people’s movement from the WiFi data, and the database cleaning process.

If you look at the image above, you’ll see the map of the office space that was used for this prototype. The blue dots represent the locations of the WiFi sniffers.

Read the full article

If you want to read the full article on Medium, click here. Don’t forget to give it a clap and comment. We would love to hear what you think about it.

WiFi Packet analyzer (aka WiFi Sniffer) using ESP32 and Python

Furthermore, if you’re interested in learning more about sniffing WiFi packets using ESP32 and Zerynth, we have a full tutorial for you.

In the tutorial, you will be looking at the Promiscuous Mode (WiFi sniffer) for the ESP32 based boards and as an example. And you are going to see the implementation of WiFi sniffer using Zerynth Studio.

Of course, you can use any of the Zerynth supported boards that are based on ESP32.

Download Zerynth Studio

Download Zerynth Studio today, and start programming 32-bit microcontrollers in Python, too. Zerynth Studio is free to download and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.