htop for the airwaves — a live 802.11 RF dashboard in your terminal
Details
- External ID
- 48317997
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- htop for the airwaves — a live 802.11 RF dashboard in your terminal
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- May 29, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 10
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5969305331179321
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- wifi network monitoring dashboard
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While terminal interfaces are easy to build, capturing and analyzing 802.11 wireless frames in real time requires low-level kernel driver integration and RF packet parsing.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires C, Rust, or Go using Linux `nl80211` netlink APIs and `libpcap` to switch compatible Wi-Fi hardware into monitor mode and handle active channel hopping. The difficult part is parsing 802.11 radiotap frames and beacon/probe packets at line rate, accurately calculating signal-to-noise ratios and channel utilization, and feeding aggregated telemetry to a TUI without dropping frames.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 370 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #145 of 371 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 210 days after the earliest competitor.
- Rdio · hn · 2026-08-14 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Turn commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence · hn · 2026-07-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Crate · hn · 2026-07-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Blotter, a live map of LAPD radio activity · hn · 2026-04-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- HaloBattery · github · 2026-09-25 · 255 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- wormhole-display · github · 2026-09-14 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- turnrelay · github · 2026-09-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- ha-ps5-remoteplay · github · 2026-09-15 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.47
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.