beacons

All Cameras Are Beacons. A little gadget that quietly notices when surveillance gear is around you and gives you a heads-up, either on your phone or out over a Meshtastic mesh.

It runs on the beacon (our own two-radio board) and on the Colonel Panic OUI-Spy and Mesh-Detect boards (tiny Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 dev boards). Plug it in and it listens for the radio signals that cameras, sensors, and drones are already shouting into the air. When it detects one, it tells you.

Important this only ever listens. It does not jam, spoof, or interfere with anything. It is the radio equivalent of noticing a camera on a pole and writing it down. Mapping surveillance gear in public is a long-standing privacy practice (the folks at deflock.me have been at it a while).

the beacon the beacon is a pocket detector, about the size of an airpods case, that quietly maps the surveillance broadcasting around you. flip it on, drop it in a bag, and everything it hears shows up live on your phone.

it is a passive listener on two bands, WiFi and bluetooth. surveillance gear announces itself over the air to do its job; the beacon recognizes those broadcasts and puts them on your map. it never transmits, jams, or spoofs. it is a detector, not a weapon.

what it catches

flock / ALPR license-plate cameras, plus flock's raven audio sensors drones overhead: the FAA remote ID broadcast is the main tell, and DJI, Parrot, Skydio, Autel, and Yuneec craft are also flagged by their own radio hardware when they aren't broadcasting it body-worn cameras in range (Axon, matched on its own registered hardware address and on its device tag. a broader Motorola Solutions vendor match sits on its own switch under body cam, opt-in and off by default: in our own capture every one of those hits was fixed equipment, not anything worn, so it reads as a weak match to verify rather than a confirmed camera) BLE item trackers riding along with you (AirTag / Find My, Tile, SmartTag; off by default. your phone sees a tracker from the first sighting, and the buzzer holds quiet for that tracker's first minute, so one you merely walk past never sounds) smart / recording glasses on the people around you (Ray-Ban / Oakley Meta, Snap Spectacles, Vuzix; honest "possible glasses" call, since the Meta signature can also be a VR headset) network cameras on the WiFi you're on (opt-in, off by default; branded IP-camera OUIs like Hikvision, Dahua, Amcrest, Axis, Reolink on the host network. it matches known camera brands, not every camera, and is never a hidden-camera claim) the device

dual radio: a dedicated bluetooth scanner runs flat-out while a second radio handles WiFi and the app link, so neither starves the other. single-radio boards time-slice one antenna between scanning and the phone link, which costs them about half their bluetooth listening time; the beacon's bluetooth scan is continuous, a measured 100% duty against ~51%, and a street drive found 2.5x more unique bluetooth devices over the same route. the numbers are in how much does it actually hear? below location tagged via your phone's GPS an on-board buzzer alerts you, so it works with your phone put away optional offline logging: opt in once and it keeps what it heard while you were gone, encrypted, waiting when you reconnect ships pre-flashed and ready to pair, nothing to set up out of the box USB-C powered (the battery model recharges over the same port). when new firmware lands the app flags it and installs it over-the-air over bluetooth, no cable and no toolchain; you can also flash from your browser in one click at soyboi.tech/flash free app, paid hardware. the iOS and android apps are free and open source, and so is the firmware, read every line before you trust it. the beacon hardware is what we sell. buy the beacon, own the data: no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry, every detection stays on your device.

get one. everything about the beacon lives at soyboi.tech. preorder on tindie.

honest about limits. silent gear stays invisible: wired cameras and purely optical systems emit no radio and won't show up. this is not an SDR or a bug sweeper, it listens to two bands for known signatures, nothing more. a quiet screen means nothing announced itself, not that you're unwatched.