ESPectre
Motion sensor made of Wi-Fi: senses people moving through a room from changes in the radio channel, no camera.
Chipnik catalog@chipnik-catalogWhat you need
- Board
- One of 5 boards: ESP32 DevKit, ESP32-S3 DevKit, ESP32-C3 SuperMini and 2 more
- Parts
- Nothing else, the board is enough
- Also
- Wi-Fi network
ESPectre detects movement in a room from Wi-Fi Channel State Information. The board listens to your router's signal; a person walking through the room changes how the radio waves bounce, and ESPectre measures that change. It reports motion to Home Assistant as an ESPHome device, with no camera and no PIR sensor. Original project by francescopace on GitHub, GPL-3.0. Chipnik hosts the release binaries unchanged so you can flash them from the browser.
Place the board a few metres from the router with the room between them. It learns the empty room for a minute after start, then reports movement. Sensitivity and other settings are in Home Assistant.
The ESP32-C6 and C5 boards give the most stable readings, according to the author.
Firmware files come from the 3.1.0 release.
After flashing
- The board restarts by itself when flashing is done.
- The project needs Wi-Fi. How to connect it is in the project text or in the source repository.
- If nothing happens, press the RST (EN) button once.
Versions
3.1.0 added to Chipnik 2026-11-05
Release 3.1.0 of francescopace/espectre, files unchanged. Release notes on GitHub