Illuminating the Invisible: Building a Real-Time WiFi Radar with Rust & Zig

zang — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:10:21 +0000

Introduction:
Most people see WiFi as a list of names in a settings menu. I see it as a crowded, invisible aether. I wanted to build something that looked like a Cold War radar but ran on the Solana blockchain.

The Challenge:
Rust is amazing for GUIs (egui), but when you want to talk to the Linux Kernel via nl80211 netlink calls, things get messy. That’s where Zig comes in. I’m using Zig to handle the raw C-ABI kernel communication and wrapping it into a Rust shared library.

Key Features:

Modern
-Grade UI: Real-time sweeping radar in egui.

Zig Backend: Blazing fast, low-level netlink intercepts.

ZK-Privacy: Scan the world, but keep your home address off the map.

Check out the repo: https://github.com/zang7777/six-eye

DEV Community: zang

[Boost]

Illuminating the Invisible: Building a Real-Time WiFi Radar with Rust & Zig

Illuminating the Invisible: Building a Real-Time WiFi Radar with Rust & Zig