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A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

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Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#171

Post by wyager »

grujicd wrote: post #152
Grazester wrote: post #88

Who leaves 10K worth of anything in their car? I get antsy leaving my $200 laptop hidden under my seat! This person is crazy. There is also no guarantee they person who stole the bag wouldn't dump the bag(with the hidden AirTag) and just keep the gear or that the police would help recover it even if you gave them the location(many times the don't).

It's not very risky to leave expensive items in the car, but in the trunk, not on the backseat! Also, never put these expensive items or really any kind of bag in the trunk after you park. Always do it before the ride. Or at least make very sure that no one is watching you. This is a basic safety drill. And it doesn't apply to expensive things only. You don't want your window broken for a sport bag with a sweaty t-sh…

> in the trunk, not on the backseat! Also, never put these expensive items or really any kind of bag in the trunk after you park... You don't want your window broken for a sport bag

A frustrating thing is that it's completely optional to live in a society where this is a problem. We know how to stop this from happening. There are places where you just don't have to live in fear of some low-life breaking your window, and we have the technical ability to replicate those conditions in any moderately-wealthy country, if we aren't prevented from doing so.

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#172

Post by elzbardico »

jmull wrote: post #81

I know this is useful (for something), but I'm stuck on the plot holes in the motivating story... Why didn't they replace the battery when the app complained? How long would a thief really keep the AirTag anyway? If the thief did keep the AirTag and you tracked them down, then what? A confrontation has a fairly high chance to have a worse result than losing some equipment. You could try to get the police to do it, bu…

A lot of those thiefs are not hardened criminals, because the payoff for this kind of crime is usually a small fraction of the actual value of the things stolen. Most of time it is the average wimpy addict and the reason he resort to this kind of criminal activity is preciselly because he is not ready for the violent potential of more profitable criminal activities.

If you relativelly fit, and have some experience with actual fights or training in martial arts, it is not that stupid to try to recover your stuff.

If you don't feel confortable with the prospect of any kind of violent confrontation or don't have the street smarts to evaluate the risk potential of saidconfrontation, you'd still have the hope that the police would do something anyway if you have the location of your goods.

Really, at some time we need to stop glorifying cowardice and reclaim a little bit of dignity.

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#173

Post by theshrike79 »

Grazester wrote: post #126
npretto wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely going to lunch with 10k of equipment is safer, especially when you'll need to go to the toilet.

It's a backpack. You hang it on the hook on the stall door where you hang your jacket I think there is less of a likelihood someone is going to jump you for your backpack when you are at a restaurant for lunch than there is for them breaking into a car parked only a dimly lit street for said backpack.

Except that American public toilets have gaps so large between the door and the frame that a thief can pretty much just grab the backpack without opening the door =)

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#174

Post by nucleardog »

kube-system wrote: post #92
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's ok though, right? As long as you do a good job placing/hiding it, the thief can't easily find and remove/disable without the speaker.

How big is your item and how hard is it to search? If you know a bag has an airtag in it, it won't take that long to find.

If you get a bit creative you can definitely hide it well enough that "removing the air tag" is no longer the weak point in the plan.

I've got a Pelican 1510 that has a suitcase-style pop up handle and wheels on it. It's just screwed on there. I took the screws out, took it off, filed the sides of the air tag down slightly so I could fit it in a little cranny and then held it in place with some black tape so it's hard to see. Even if you use an iPhone to try and find it, it looks like it's hidden in the liner or something. But it takes tools and about 15 minutes to get it out _even if you know exactly where it is_ and how to get to it.

For one of my backpacks it actually came with an "air tag pocket" which is just a spot on an inside seam where there's a small gap you can slide the air tag in and it's held securely. I know it's there and it still takes me a while to find the thing to take it out.

For my other, I pretty much just get by on it having a bazillion little pockets and pouches and lot of random stuff in it. The air tag's nestled in there beside the flashlight that the TSA spent almost a half hour looking for after x-raying my bag repeatedly before finally telling me what they were looking for and me pulling it out for them.

I'm relatively certain I'd recover my bag with the air tag still in it. Whether or not the _valuables_ are still there is a different story.

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#175

Post by Karliss »

saturn8601 wrote: post #25

Any chance that the AirTag could have a software memory leak that would normally be masked by cutting power once a year? Its possible right? The code must be written in something low level like C. Would be kinda funny if 10 years from now the author gets his stuff stolen again and then discovers said memory leak crashed the Airtag 9 years ago. As Elon Musk likes to say: "The most ironic outcome is the most likely" .…

Reasonably designed embedded device like that should be using a watchdog timer which automatically restarts it if code gets stuck (it's a basic hardware level feature available in almost all microcontrollers), and any crash should also cause a reboot.

Considering the nature of product there is no interactive interface, it doesn't perform any critical operation like motor or heater control which couldn't be easily interrupted and resumed a fraction of second later after the reboot. In case of memory leak or some kind of memory allocator error it would also be safe to reboot. User wouldn't even notice if this happened.

So even if something goes wrong, chance of it being uncrecoverable seems low. It would need to be either some kind of persistent storage bug causing it to get stuck in a bootloop (in which case battery change wouldn't help either), or high level logic error preventing normal functioning while keeping the main loop running without crash or getting stuck (writing code in higher level programming language wouldn't prevent a logic error).

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#176

Post by RandallBrown »

kube-system wrote: post #111
wholinator2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, a suitcase could be quickly dispatched but you could hide it very very well on something like a car.

Maybe, but is any old car thief on the street going to hang on to a car they know has an airtag in it? They probably were going to joy ride it for the afternoon, maybe commit some other crime, wreck it, and dump it regardless. I have an airtag in my car, but I don't think I'm going to get much value out of it other than finding my car when I forget where I'm parked. If you want to catch a criminal in the act, you usu…

> but is any old car thief on the street going to hang on to a car they know has an airtag in it?

No, and that's mostly the point right? If they get in the car, get an alert they're being tracked, then dump the car, at least you find it faster.

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#177

Post by hnlmorg »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #146
jakespencer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been my experience. I’ve had multiple AirTags notify me multiple times over a period of months that I needed to change the batteries.

So last week my keys AirTag was dead, and I checked my notifications and I only received one notification in October that it had a low battery, but to be fair, I don't know exactly when it died between October and last week. Maybe my batteries die completely before the second notification triggers.

How do you check historic notifications?

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#178

Post by bee_rider »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #159

I don't see how this huge tracker would help with the stolen camera gear. At least an airtag is small enough, you can probably glue it to the bottom of the camera, paint it black.

It is huge compared to an AirTag, but as somebody who doesn’t know much about cameras, if I stole a photographer’s stuff and something like that was in there, I’d probably not think too much about it. It is a black rectangle. Professionals have countless black rectangles that I don’t understand.

If they wanted to be really clever, they could easily find space to disguise it as a usb hard drive or something (I mean they could literally stick a USB hard drive in the thing, they are so tiny nowadays).

Re: A 10-Year Battery for AirTag

#179

Post by lxgr »

Nice! Definitely somewhat of a niche use case, but I don't doubt that it exists.

I do wonder though: Do AA batteries actually have a shelf life of 10 years even without supplying any current?

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