So using this nice hackaday post I started doing some packet sniffing and I got it working. Sort of.

tcpdump -i mon0 -elnq "type mgt and wlan host 00:11:22:33:44:55" | sed s/^/\\a/

This actually stopped working and I don't entirely know why. I'm just going to have to dive into the 801.11 protocol and see what I can find.

As near as I can tell this puts out the management packets from that particular mac address and then puts them through sed where it appends a beep to the terminal. The key is to figure out how to route this through my python program or how to do it an efficient manner (that pi gets pretty hot when running).

I've looked into pcap and just coding my own solution but then I get away from some of the nice features of python. So that's where I am at.