The ESP32 is a low-cost, commercially available system-on-chip microcontroller developed by Espressif Systems, featuring integrated dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities that enable it to transmit and capture Channel State Information (CSI) at the packet level. Its significance to the WiFi sensing field lies in its accessibility and affordability as a commodity hardware platform, making it possible to build reproducible, open-source sensing systems without reliance on specialized or expensive equipment such as Intel 5300 NICs or software-defined radios. Key variants used in sensing research include the ESP32 and its successors, which are commonly deployed in transmitter-receiver pairs to collect CSI data for applications such as occupancy estimation, gesture recognition, and activity detection.
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