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A Raspberry Pi can scan your home network for active IPv4 devices and help check whether familiar devices are connected. The project behind the headline is a local Wi-Fi presence detector—not a way to reveal every device tracking your family, detect spyware, or identify every nearby wireless device.
What the Raspberry Pi project actually does
The Raspberry Pi Official Magazine tutorial, “Wifi detector – know who’s at home”, uses arp-scan to list active IPv4 devices visible on the local network. Its example compares scan results with known device MAC addresses, such as those belonging to a phone or laptop, to infer whether those devices are on the Wi-Fi.
That is a limited, network-level check at the time of the scan. What appears depends on network layout, whether a device is active, and whether it is visible to the scanner. The tutorial is a legacy article; it does not establish that its commands and dependencies have been validated for a current Raspberry Pi OS release.
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The project’s central command is:
sudo arp-scan -lIt asks arp-scan to list devices on the local network. The tutorial then describes comparing the output with known MAC addresses and using a script to check several devices. Treat the results as clues about network presence, not as a complete or definitive inventory.
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What you need to check before using a Pi
Wireless capability varies across Raspberry Pi models. Raspberry Pi’s getting-started documentation notes that a Pi without built-in Wi-Fi can use a USB Wi-Fi adapter, and cautions that some adapters and models do not support 5 GHz.
- Check the wireless capabilities of the specific Pi model you plan to use.
- If it needs an adapter, verify that adapter’s compatibility and supported bands.
- Check whether the project’s older software instructions work with your chosen operating-system release; the tutorial does not confirm current-version compatibility.
The project article does not specify a particular current Pi model or storage-card requirement.
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Why a MAC address may not identify a device permanently
A scan may show a MAC address associated with a device’s Wi-Fi connection, but that address is not necessarily a durable identifier for the physical device. Apple documents per-network private Wi-Fi addresses, with fixed and rotating modes on newer operating systems. Apple says: “A rotating private address reduces tracking by periodically changing this device’s Wi-Fi address on the network.” This appears in “Wi-Fi privacy with Apple devices,” published December 19, 2024.
Android 10 and later use randomized MAC addresses by default for Wi-Fi connections. The Android Open Source Project explains that whether an address persists or changes can depend on the connection and other conditions in its documentation on MAC randomization behavior. As a result, a previously noted address may not always match what a later scan reports.
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Choose a tool based on what you want to know
| Approach | Useful for | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
Raspberry Pi with arp-scan |
Checking which active IPv4 devices are visible on the local network, including whether known device addresses appear. | It is not a universal tracker detector, and the project does not establish current OS compatibility or comprehensive device discovery. |
| Home Assistant device tracking | Household presence workflows, including using tracker entities in zones and automations. See Home Assistant’s device tracker documentation and presence-detection guide. | It is an adjacent option with documented integrations, not a feature of the Raspberry Pi tutorial’s script. |
| Pi-hole | DNS filtering, including blocking domains through its DNS sinkhole function. See the Pi-hole overview. | DNS filtering is a different job from scanning a local network for connected devices. |
What the scan cannot tell you about tracking
A device inventory and a tracking investigation answer different questions. A visible IPv4 device may be connected to the network, but that alone does not say whether it is tracking anyone. Conversely, this scan does not claim to find web trackers, spyware, every device in the household, or all devices transmitting nearby over Wi-Fi.
Use the project for its narrower purpose: a basic indication of whether known devices are present on the scanned network. For presence automations, consider a platform with documented tracker integrations; for domain filtering, use a DNS-filtering approach. Neither changes the scope of what this Pi scan can reveal.
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