CREDITS

This guide stands on a lot of community work. Acknowledging it here, organized by what each project contributes to the WDGWars-or-WiGLE pipeline.

Want to be listed? Run a wardriving Discord, ship a relevant GitHub project, sell wardriving hardware, or cover WDGWars / wardriving on YouTube? Open an issue or PR at github.com/HiroAlleyCat/wdgwars-onramp, or ask HiroAlleyCat (or any active contributor) on the WDGWars Discord. Bar to be added: one primary source we can verify (your README, channel About page, or storefront).

The game

LOCOSP — created WDGWars (wdgwars.pl) and maintains the firmware family that uploads to it. The whole reason this repo exists. Repos:

FusedStamen — maintains a uConsole-focused fork of WatchDogsGo that tracks upstream and hardens the game for the ClockworkPi uConsole (CM4): GPS PTY + bridge baud config, Bluetooth adapter pinning via udev, a packet sniffer and airodump-ng handshake-capture path driven from an AWUS036ACM, a XIAO auto-detect launcher, and bridge-stability fixes (scan rate limiting, cache fallback, upload-timeout handling). Same author as the antenna-database credited under General-hobby documentation.

Capture firmwares

justcallmekoko (Mark Spencer) — creator and maintainer of the dominant ESP32 wardriving firmware family. The KokosStripClub Discord + the near-daily nightly releases keep the Marauder community a moving target in a healthy way.

pr3y and the Bruce contributors — Bruce upstream firmware (BruceDevices/firmware). LOCOSP’s WDGWars-flavored Bruce is a fork; the upstream is what gives Bruce its broad M5 + LilyGO + CYD support.

Spooks4576 — Ghost_ESP. Wide chip support (classic + S2 + S3 + C3 + C6). For a long time the only stock binary for bare ESP32-C3, with the caveat that some commands lack BSSID on that chip; as of the 2026-08-11 check Piglet’s board=c3 target is a second option, so see §4 of the survey. This repo is archived as of the 2026-07-25 check (last push 2025-04-22); see GhostESP Revival below for the maintained continuation.

7h30th3r0n3 — two heavyweight community projects:

hamspiced — Piglet (hamspiced/piglet). Modern XIAO ESP32 wardriving firmware (213★ as of 2026-08-11, actively shipping) with a clean web UI for WDGWars uploads. Adds XIAO C5/S3/C6 to the on-device-uploader chip set, plus a XIAO C3 target and a standalone LilyGO T-Dongle C5 port. The fourth confirmed on-device WDGWars uploader. Piglet hardware is sold via hamspiced on Tindie and Midwest Gadgets.

codehedge — Biscuit (biscuitshop.us), docs at the Biscuit Wiki. Commercial, phone-app-controlled WiFi/BLE research device line: dual-ESP32 Biscuit Pro / Ultra (dual-band WiFi 6 + BLE), a single-chip ESP32-C5 Biscuit DIY, and BiscuitNode mesh satellites. Has a GPS wardrive mode with WiGLE upload and a multi-destination upload framework. Feed WDGWars via WiGLE data → wigle-to-wdgwars. Support status, 2026-07-25: it uploads. Field-verified working from Biscuit Pro, Biscuit Ultra, and the free DIY firmware. LOCOSP’s press page lists Biscuit under THE GEAR as “community-built portable wardriving devices, natively supported by WDGWars (integration in progress)” and names Biscuit as a consumer of GET /api/me for key validation, so the published status trails what the devices actually do. The free DIY Biscuit firmware runs on any ESP32-C5 with 8 MB flash + 8 MB PSRAM (T-Dongle C5, XIAO ESP32C5, generic C5 dev boards) via the browser flasher at flasher.biscuitshop.us.

Hellz (Sean Clossey) — HellzGate C5 (Hellz0wnzJ00/hellzgate), site hellzgate.com. An in-development ESP32-C5 multi-node passive survey array (one master + up to nine scanner nodes over an I²C backplane, dual-band Wi-Fi + BLE, GPS). Firmware closed-source; on-device WiGLE / WDGWars upload is on the Phase 3 roadmap. WDGWars Discord mod.

JesseCHale — HaleHound (JesseCHale/HaleHound-CYD), web flasher at flash.halehound.com. ESP32-DIV-lineage multi-protocol CYD toolkit (1.4k+★); its wardrive mode writes WiGLE-compatible CSV to SD that feeds wigle-to-wdgwars. Capture-only — no native WDGWars upload. Also does passive Flock Safety ALPR and Raven detection by BLE fingerprint, which overlaps DeflockJoplin/pack. Docs at segfault.solutions/halehound; built units sold at halehound.com. Upstream is cifertech/ESP32-DIV.

cifertech — ESP32-DIV, the ESP32-S3 multi-band handheld HaleHound forked from, plus the earlier wardriver3000. Site: cifertech.net.

GhostESP Revival — GhostESP-Revival/GhostESP and ghostesp.net. Picked up GhostESP after Spooks4576/Ghost_ESP was archived, and now claims 46 board targets with WiGLE CSV export and split-channel wardriving over a dual-ESP32 bridge. If you are running GhostESP today, this is almost certainly the tree you want.

0ct0sec — M5PORKCHOP. Cardputer firmware whose WARHOG mode is GPS wardriving with WiGLE and WPA-SEC hookups, wrapped in an XP-and-trophies layer. Best README in the catalog, for a given value of “best”.

Joseph Hewitt — wardriver.uk Rev3 and the wardriver.uk wiki. A dual-ESP32 board that does one thing, documented properly, from before the current handheld wave.

Jabari Lucien (NSM-Barii) — flock-back (passive ALPR camera detection while wardriving) and Dooku, the hardened Pi 5 + Kismet + 4-adapter rig built around it.

LAB5 / C5Lab (Labolatorium, Wrocław PL) — hardware + firmware group focused on the ESP32-C5. Their projectZero firmware (181★ as of 2026-07-25) runs on the Flipper Zero Pager via their LAB ESP32C5 add-on PCB, and on Cardputer ADV / Tab5 via their M5MonsterC5 add-on (193★ for the M5MonsterC5-CardputerADV repo). LOCOSP’s press page calls the C5 running projectZero “the absolute foundation” of the WDGWars rig. The add-ons expose sub-1 GHz capture on chips that otherwise can’t do it. Hardware sold from Tindie store and lab5-11 Shopify; quick-start at c5lab.github.io/projectZero.

Communities

The Discord servers and forums where the people behind the above firmwares answer questions. Invite links rot; the durable references are the project README files.

Third-party feeders

Tools authored outside LOCOSP and HiroAlleyCat that POST to wdgwars.pl.

Parent platform

WiGLE — the long-running, free, ad-free hobby database. WDGWars’s bulk-upload format is WigleWifi-1.6 (WiGLE’s own spec at api.wigle.net/csvFormat.html). The hobby in this corner of the internet would not exist without WiGLE.

The official WiGLE Android app (Google Play) is the recommended Tier-1 capture tool in Newcomer onramp.

General-hobby documentation

ringmast4r — the closest thing the broader wardriving hobby has to a unified one-stop reference.

agucova/awesome-esp — broader ESP8266/32 project curation, useful for finding adjacent firmwares.

FusedStamen — antenna-database. An empirically measured WiFi antenna SWR database for wardriving, characterized on a LiteVNA 64 with a documented methodology and field-tested on a Biscuit Ultra. 130+ antennas across 20+ batches with Good / Marginal / Do_Not_Use verdicts based on worst in-band SWR. The reference for “is this antenna actually resonant in-band, or just marketed that way” — covers WiFi sticks, paddles, MIMO panels, plus LoRa 915 / ADS-B 1090 / GPS L1 / BLE.

Runaque — author of the Tab5 Wardriver build on Hackster. Recipe for the high-end Tab5 path.

YouTube and video coverage

Video is how most newcomers see a working rig before they spend money, and wardriving is a hobby where a two-minute clip settles arguments a spec sheet can’t. Channels first, then specific videos worth the click, then how to get your own coverage picked up by the game itself.

Channels

Channel handles rot slower than Discord invites but faster than repos. Where a creator also authors a firmware, the GitHub profile in the sections above is the durable pointer.

Specific videos worth the click

Linked by URL rather than by channel, because several of these come from small channels or one-off uploads. Titles are as published.

Getting your own coverage in front of players

LOCOSP auto-features community wardriving videos on the WDGWars map and on the press page. Mechanism, quoted from wdgwars.pl/press (read 2026-07-25):

• Put one of #wdgwars, #WDGWars, #WatchDogsGoWars, or #WatchDogsGo in the video title or description. Case doesn’t matter; the title is better because it’s more visible. For shorts, put it in the description too.
• Featured videos appear as a center overlay on the main map (once per user, with a close button) and as a thumbnail grid in the Community videos section of the press page.
• It runs on RSS polling, refreshed roughly every 30 minutes. No approval step, no API keys, no OAuth.
• Only channels an admin has added to the tracker are scanned, so the one manual step is DMing @locosp on Discord or GitHub to get your channel added. After that, tagging is all it takes.

That page is also the canonical place to discover new WDGWars-specific coverage as it ships.

Adjacent open-source tooling

Projects the onramp leans on without listing them as feeders themselves. Each is the reference implementation for its slot. The full catalog of wardriving-capable projects, including everything with no WDGWars uploader at all, is in Hardware survey §3e, with star counts and last-push dates in §10.

HiroAlleyCat feeder family

The sibling repos to this one. Released under MIT, source available, primary author maintained.

Hardware vendors

Vendors mentioned across Shopping list. Linked here for one-page reference.

This repo

wdgwars-onramp is MIT licensed. Fork freely. If you adapt the guide for your community, an attribution link back to the repo is appreciated but not required.

Author: HiroAlleyCat on GitHub.

Corrections welcome

If you authored one of the projects above and want the attribution updated, corrected, or removed — open an issue or PR. The contribution rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.