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Stupid question as someone who worked on wifi for many many years: What is the point of this? How is this remotely useful? There are tons of better technologies
by blobbers 3y ago
Stupid question as someone who worked on wifi for many many years:
What is the point of this?
How is this remotely useful?
There are tons of better technologies to use?
Let me guess, this thing puts the wifi into some constant transmit mode and measures loss rates as it passes through objects, and scans in some pattern, measuring loss rates at the other side.
Is this just packet based radar? Is this a cute way of saying "using the 5GHz band to scan through walls when you have a receiver on the other side of your object"?
Here's the thing:
different materials absorb / reflect radio waves with different characteristics. You could just as easily make these letters out of a completely different material that doesn't remotely resemble a letter and it could look exactly like a letter.
How is this useful? And why is wifi the medium to do it.
You can't just do this with a regular old driver. Your normal driver will be selecting antennas, adjusting rates for loss rates. This is clearly a dedicated radio with some open source driver that they've hacked to do this.
Ugh. This just seems like a dumb waste of time. This isn't even a passive radar, as it requires there to be a receiver on the other side. There is no bouncing back of signals.
"It does not require any prior RF data for training a machine learning system for RF sensing."
Yes, but it does require very specific material characteristics that it is trying to detect at fixed distances. Namely edge keller cones on specific materials, and hoping that other materials don't replicate similar patterns.
- andrewtesting44 3y agoJust to clarify, the receivers are on the same side as the transmitters
- stagger87 3y agoYes, essentially radar. Wifi is the medium because you already have a router in your home. This sort of capability is being introduced into the newest WLAN standards and is being promoted as the next step towards smart homes and devices. The idea being that a standard router can be used to detect human presence, and therefore do things like turn on/off lights, HVAC, etc. This might make even more sense in the commercial space. This would be as far as I'm aware the first attempt at doing something like this without additional hardware (mounted sensors). It should in theory lower the barrier to entry even further. There are higher frequency variations of this that could in theory do things like detect breathing. Some people are talking about it being like the new lifeline button or baby monitor. How well it's implemented will ultimately determine it's usefulness IMO.
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- kenhwang 3y agoOh, hey, I knew someone who helped with research on this while I was at UCSB over a decade ago. From the way they described the goals of their research, it wasn't so much using WiFi as radar with specially flashed router drivers doing emitting and receiving, that's just a research convenience. The whole point is to passively detect objects using already existing WiFi signals. It's easy enough to figure out where the router is, and if the router is regularly noisy enough, the idea is they would have enough data to work with. The research results from a decade ago was able to pinpoint and uniquely identify humans and weapons. Not hard to guess how that could be useful to the DoD.
- sgirard 3y agoI would love to be able to image elements inside a wall cavity: studs, pipes, ductwork, electrical lines. I don't know if it's possible with this technique, but maybe someday these ideas will lead to something like an x-ray for building structures.
- kenhwang 3y agoYou're describing a modern off the shelf studfinder. Those already use magnets, radar, and ultrasound to detect studs, pipes, and wires.
- gweinberg 3y agoI've got a stud detector and it works like crap. But it's pretty old, maybe new ones are better.
- reaperman 3y agoProject Farm has a nice review and demo of many studfinders at different price points.[0] 0: https://youtu.be/sWMJhfMPWn4?si=pA--ZqeMaK_y8hfo https://youtu.be/sWMJhfMPWn4?si=pA--ZqeMaK_y8hfo
- Fabricio20 3y agoOne use that personally springs to mind, is if this technology is developed enough, SWAT/Rescue teams could use this to find where people are inside buildings. No need for letter-reading precision, just good enough to be easily deployable on-site and work well enough to find where people/bodies (big masses of water?) roughly are.
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y agoHack your internet and see everything in your house could be one use?