MAC Watch — macwatch / mw

Keep a watchlist of MAC addresses and get alerted when any of them comes into range — across both WiFi (probe requests) and BLE advertisements. Useful for presence detection: know when a specific phone, tag, or laptop is nearby.

Own devices / authorized monitoring only.

  1. Watchlist
  2. Usage
  3. Background mode
  4. Notes & limits
  5. See also

Watchlist

The watchlist lives at /apps/macwatch/watchlist.csv, one target per line:

mac_or_prefix,name,radio,nearRssi
Field Meaning
mac_or_prefix Full MAC (AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF) or a prefix (AA:BB:CC) to match a vendor/device family
name Friendly label shown in alerts
radio WIFI, BT, or BOTH
nearRssi Proximity threshold in dBm — alert only when signal is stronger than this (0 = any distance)

Example:

AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF,Alex phone,BOTH,-60
DC:A6:32,Raspberry Pi,WIFI,0

Usage 

CMD> mw              # foreground watch — live list of watched devices + last seen
CMD> mw add          # add a target interactively first, then watch
CMD> mw bg           # run in the background (adds an "MW" badge to the status bar)
CMD> mw stop         # stop the background watcher

In the foreground view you see each watchlist entry, whether it’s currently in range, its RSSI, and which radio spotted it. Press q to quit (the background watcher keeps running if you started it with mw bg).

Background mode

mw bg runs the watcher while you do other things — a green MW badge appears in the status bar. When a watched MAC appears (and passes its nearRssi threshold) you get a notification. It coexists with other background pollers (wg bg, ec bg, GPS).

Events are logged to /apps/macwatch/events.csv (time, mac, name, radio, rssi).

Notes & limits

  • WiFi matching relies on the target sending probe requests — a device that’s already connected and idle may not probe often. BLE matching needs the device to be advertising.
  • MAC randomization defeats matching a full MAC on modern phones. Use a prefix (vendor OUI) or pair it with Tracking Detection / BLE Monitor for randomized devices.
  • Background HW test still pending.

See also