Flock Detection With a ESP32-C5 #esp32 #deflock

Our Take

Valleytech Custom Solutions drops a quick, code-heavy look at using the new ESP32-C5 chip to hunt for Flock Safety signatures. The description is bare-bones and the clip is short, so we're not going to pretend we know the full technical recipe here — but the concept alone is worth sitting with. Cheap, programmable microcontrollers are now capable of poking at the wireless fingerprints these cameras leave behind, which means the barrier to building your own ALPR detector just dropped again.

This matters because the surveillance industry assumes most people will never look under the hood. Every time a tinkerer open-sources a method for sniffing out a Flock unit, that assumption gets weaker. DIY detection work like this complements the slower, crowd-sourced effort of physically documenting camera locations — the kind of groundwork that fills out our camera map one confirmed sighting at a time.

We'd still urge caution before treating any hobbyist build as a turnkey solution — verify, test, and don't assume a blinking LED means you've beaten the system. But the more people experimenting in this space, the harder it gets for networked ALPR surveillance to stay invisible. If you want to do something concrete with what you learn from videos like this, our take-action page has next steps for documenting and pushing back on camera deployments in your area.