SquachWatch-CYD

Surveillance-device detector for the ESP32-2432S028R ("Cheap Yellow Display"), and a growing list of other ESP32 boards.

SquachWatch-CYD sniffs WiFi and Bluetooth for known wireless signatures of Flock Safety cameras, Axon body cameras, recording glasses, card skimmers, AirTags, drones, proximity beacons and pentest hardware. On the 2.8" CYD it listens on 2.4 GHz and runs standalone on the bare board — no PC, no extras, just plug it into USB. A few other boards hear more: the NM-CYD-C5 scans 5 GHz as well, and the T-Watch S3 listens to LoRa, with GPS on the S3 Plus (see Boards).

The UI is a vaporwave-themed take on the SquachWare aesthetic: matrix digital rain, Squachy the mascot, full-screen dramatic ALERT overlays, and the glitchy SquachWatch wordmark.

That is the firmware itself, not a mockup.
Every frame above was rendered by the same C++ that runs on the board, compiled for a PC.
Click it to drive it in your browser →

What it detects

Confidence is per signature, not per type

Every hardware prefix in the firmware was checked against the IEEE registry rather than against other detectors. Of 97 rows: 33 High, 4 Medium, 60 Low.

That grading matters most on FLOCK, where exactly one of 49 prefixes is registered to Flock Safety and the rest are the generic chip and module makers' blocks they build on (Espressif, Liteon, Silicon Labs and friends) — real evidence, shared with every dev board on earth. ALERT FILTER is a minimum-confidence gate, so setting it to High keeps a passing ESP32 in the log without taking over the screen.

The audit also removed 00:0E:58, which sat here for eleven releases labelled "Vigilant" and is registered to Sonos. Every speaker in range was being logged as a plate reader.

IBEACON ships switched off — not a judgement about importance, one about volume. One shop can put more beacons in range than this device would otherwise see all week. It is one tap away in TYPE FILTER.

Boards

Not sure which to buy? The 2.8" CYD (ESP32-2432S028R) is about $15 and is the board everything here is designed on: built-in 320×240 TFT, resistive touch, a microSD slot and an RGB light, and nothing else to add. No GPS, no extra modules; the board is the whole device. Every board below is on the web flasher. BETA means it runs the whole firmware but has had fewer hours on it. The longer answer is in docs/FAQ.md.

Board builds and their confirmed hardware support are listed in platformio.ini. Compatible variants can share an environment when runtime detection handles their hardware differences, as with the original CYD and the DIYmalls JC2432W328C.

Web Flash

No build tools, no IDE, no cloning anything — flash a board straight from your browser:

https://squachwatch.com/

Works in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Brave on desktop. Pick your board from the list (it is grouped by family, and there is a box for the code printed on the back if you are not sure which you have), plug in, click Connect & Install, done. A T-Watch has its clock set for it once the install finishes.

Build

Three steps:

1. Install PlatformIO (CLI or VS Code extension).
2. Clone the repo: sh git clone https://github.com/skizzophrenic/SquachWatch-CYD cd SquachWatch-CYD
3. Build and flash: sh pio run -t upload For a board that is not the default three, name its build, e.g. pio run -e freenove-s3 -t upload.

The first build pulls the TFT_eSPI, XPT2046, and NimBLE-Arduino libraries; after that it's incremental.

A full beginner-friendly walkthrough is in docs/BUILD.md.

Updating

Your settings, PIN and squad stay put whichever way you go.