Inspired by this project on Hackaday where submitter Mattia used Python to nmap scan his WiFi network, triggering alerts when particular MAC addresses are found, and with my dreams of home-automation in mind, I came up with a slightly different way of achieving the same thing.
My router is a cheapo TP-LINK, but it does come with a "currently connected MAC addresses" page in the web interface so my first thought was using BeautifulSoup to do some parsing. Then I found references to a telnet interface.
Connecting to the Telnet interface I quickly found that the command "wlctl assoclistinfo" gave me this output:
Associated stations:4
Num Mac Address Time
1 F0:C1:F1:22:xx:xx 00:02:30:04
2 90:21:55:B0:xx:xx 01:02:20:26
3 00:0F:54:10:xx:xx 03:09:17:28
4 74:E1:B6:2C:xx:xx 30:04:37:48
Firing up Python and the telnetlib telnet-automation module meant that 10 minutes later I was printing comma-separated MAC addresses to the console using this snippet of code:
Finally, I am triggering this in my Raspberry Pi via a simple crontab entry:
* * * * * logger `python /home/pi/wlan_sensor/sense.py`
This gives me per-minute logging of WiFi clients, giving me the information I need to the first of my home-automation projects - turning on the lights when I get home.
