# Ep 355: Person Detectors, Walkie Talkies, Open Smartphones, and a WiFi Traffic Light

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/hackaday-podcast-679153/ep-355-person-detectors-walkie-talkies-open-smartphones-and-a-wifi-traffic-light
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/hackaday-podcast-679153/ep-355-person-detectors-walkie-talkies-open-smartphones-and-a-wifi-traffic-light.md
Podcast: [Hackaday Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/hackaday-podcast-679153)
Published: 2026-01-30T16:44:11+00:00
Episode link: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/30/hackaday-podcast-episode-355-person-detectors-walkie-talkies-open-smartphones-and-a-wifi-traffic-light/
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/hackaday/Hackaday_Podcast-Ep355.mp3?dest-id=2437685
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Duration seconds: 3271

## Resource

Another chilly evening in Western Europe, as Elliot Williams is joined this week by Jenny List to chew the fat over the week's hacks. It's been an auspicious week for anniversaries, with the hundredth since the first demonstration of a working television system in a room above a London coffee shop. John Logie Baird's mechanically-scanned TV may have ultimately been a dead-end superseded by the all-electronic systems we all know, but the importance of television for the later half of the 20th century and further is beyond question. The standout hacks of the week include a very clever use of the ESP32's WiFi API to detect people moving through a WiFi field, a promising open-source smartphone, another ESP32 project in a comms system for cyclists, more cycling on tensegrity spokes, a clever way to smooth plaster casts, and a light sculpture reflecting Wi-Fi traffic. Then there are a slew of hacks including 3D printed PCBs and gem-cut dichroic prisms, before we move to the can't-miss articles. There we're looking at document preservation, and a wallow in internet history with a look at the Netscape brand. As usual all the links you need can be found over on Hackaday, so listen, and enjoy!

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## Transcript

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