The WiFi outage that became a presence map

The home WiFi kept going on and off, and then it was gone for days. The earliest it could be fixed was "like 4-5 days, which felt like forever," he says. Eben Siyabalapitiya tried to fix it himself and got distracted by a different question: "what else can WiFi do instead of just giving internet to phones?"

The idea that became Xora came out of that. WiFi signals can be used to detect where people are in a room, not as a picture but as "a presence map on a screen like a ghost."

“Nobody hands you the skills. You get them by building something before you're ready.”

Eben Siyabalapitiya

He built a live dashboard for it. Xora shows a 2D heatmap and a 3D model of his actual room, with a glowing orb that tracks movement in real time. The X in the name is the four corners of his room where the boards sit, and "ora" comes from aura, "like the invisible field the WiFi sends out through the space." He saved up for the ESP32 boards himself. A community hub near him with 3D printers printed the custom board mounts he designed.

"Honestly this one excites me more than anything I've built before," he says.

He studies at North Albion Collegiate Institute. An earlier build is an auto targeting turret, which uses a webcam to detect a red target in real time and rotates a motor to lock onto it. It kept overshooting, "it would chase the target and blow right past it every time," until a PD controller fixed it.

There is a sign language translator, a neural network he trained using his own hands to recognise ASL signs and speak them out loud. It only runs on his laptop, he says. And there is LeafScan, a plant disease detector that started with his mom's backyard garden, where "her plants kept getting random sicknesses and neither of us knew why." He trained a model with 70,000 images and built a web app that identifies the disease from a photo.

There are more than fifteen builds now, he says, from mini robots to robots that talk and walk, all of them on his portfolio. He also got into his first hackathon, Hack the North, and won a sponsorship prize. That helped, and over the summer he got some of the projects off his laptop. Half of them still run on it.

The pattern, he says, is that projects "get to a working point and then hit a wall because the next step costs more than I can pull together." Right now he has the boards and the mounts, and four corners of a room to fill. "actually getting it to work would be a huge personal win."