I'm looking to make an Arduino powered device that can pick up wifi mac addresses and send them to a server. Is this possible? What would I need?
Thanks for helping get me started in the right direction.
You need an Arduino and a wifi shield (or build one ) at least, and build a packetsniffer-sketch. The chip on the wifi shield should provide access to the raw packets, otherwise it is not doable. To get access to the raw packets you need to have the channel, the SSID and encryption password IIRC. So it is not trivial unless you have compromised the network allready - which is not legal in several countries but I guess you allready knew that -
What is your goal?
Yes, I will have access to the network.
The goal is to be able to detect who's at my house (based on pairing names with the wifi mac address of their phones) without the devices having to be connected to the network. I know it's not secure, it doesn't need to be (but if you have any ideas how to make it secure i'd love to hear them).