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How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

manas.tech

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Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#101

Post by sllabres »

askvictor wrote: post #28

What's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi? I had assumed since they use the same frequency, and usually the same chip and antenna, they would be much the same (perhaps there are regulatory differences between them?) If anything, I'd guess that BLE would be more useful in this case as there is less handshaking, which means on a very poor connection you've got more of a chance of getting some…

I've been using three AirTags and two of the cheaper clones mentioned above. I can activate both about 100m away in the forest, if there is a line of sight.

On the other hand, i can walk an entire day through the forest (with some other people around every now and then) without a single position update from the tag.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#102

Post by dclowd9901 »

eternityforest wrote: post #22
flashback2199 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the SSID and password are the same, how would the phone tell the difference MAC address, but devices don't care, by design they will connect if the SSID and encryption type are the same, actually, you can create a mesh wifi network at your house with regular routers or access points by doing so, connecting them with wired ethernet.

Which is a very good thing, otherwise you wouldn't be able to replace a router and have stuff just work.

Orrrrr the protocol would just be smart enough to say “hey, we are thinking of connecting to this network but the MAC address is different — did you recently switch base stations?”

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#103

Post by imp0cat »

lxgr wrote: post #38
eternityforest wrote: post #26

I wonder how cheap and low power we could make tracking beacons if we didn't actually have to send any data and could accept some privacy risk. Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, or even just a simple presence signal. You'd put it on everything you own that's portable and easy to lose. When you want to find it you just search for signals. Maybe it could have an NFC silencing feature. Pe…

> Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, Well, then you could only ever track 255 different tags :) AirTags are already pretty minimal. Their battery lasts about a year, and I imagine an open source equivalent should be possible to build for under $5. This is purely guesstimated based on the fact that I have a couple of Bluetooth LE thermometer/hygrometers that cost me about $3 a piece that…

A year is a long time, but you can also get a CR2032 to USB converter and use that as a constant power source.

Why? If you're using your smart tag to track your car, you can hide it somewhere deep inside and connect it to the vehicle's battery so it always has power. Then you never have to worry about changing batteries.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#104

Post by ornornor »

Guest71022 wrote: post #85
r00fus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds awesome - got a link?

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mrvl4Xq

Interesting. Although your link is 11.70$ with 50% off for me, but if you search for “find my Apple” you get many more results with lots of options around 5$

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#105

Post by sroussey »

lxgr wrote: post #74
juanuicich wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently there are Find My compatible generic tags coming out of China already, and they cost less than $5, shipping included. I say apparently because I’m still waiting for one to arrive and test.

Interesting! I would have thought that Apple would add some sort of tamper-proof hardware authentication mechanism, given how expensive and privacy-sensitive AirTags are.

They opened it up to avoid anti-trust issues.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#106

Post by Maxion »

ridgeguy wrote: post #99

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife…

Even with all the hate Apple gets in the tech sphere, they do have a lot of very handy features in their products.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#107

Post by semireg »

I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartment building. Using Find My will show you a “warmer … warmer … colder” kind of UI and whenever I lifted my phone to a particular window (shades drawn) Find My would say “Nearby.” I called the police and they were genuinely excited to knock on the door. A guy answered and denied having headphones that fit the description. Another police officer brought me around to the window and had me “play sound to locate” and sure enough you could hear the beep-boops through the window. The officer went back and said “listen, we know they are in your apartment, we can hear them, either go get them or we are getting a search warrant.” The guy said “ohhhh well I did have a party last week and there’s this backpack…”

Uh huh. Headphones returned.

Another officer returned to this scene and asked if we got the headphones back. I held them up and he says: “OH $&@# YEAH!”

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#108

Post by hunter2_ »

ridgeguy wrote: post #99

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife…

> infrastructure

Imagine if anyone, not just Apple, could build on that, creating an automatic sneakernet. Populous areas without cell towers would come online, with ultra high latency. Throughput would also need to be throttled by the owner of each device to accommodate battery consumption preferences.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#109

Post by progman32 »

jojobas wrote: post #79
JCharante wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not want to mount your phone on the handlebar. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230198

Having anything to distract you on a motorcycle is a bad idea. Best to put your phone in DND, if you need directions have them in voice only.

Back when I rode, I made a little arrangement of LEDs around the speedometer in 3 concentric rings of ~32 lights. The blue LED closest to pointing North would light, the green LED would always point towards my home, and the red LED would point towards my destination (programmable before the trip). That's all I really needed. Basically a small version of a navigation arrow above video game characters. It meant that one glance at the speedometer gave me all critical information in one instant. The brain is really good at intuitively figuring out parallax, so if I was moving, two glances gave me a good idea of distance as well, though I experimented with lighting 1,3,5,7,9 LEDs as the destination got closer.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#110

Post by eternityforest »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #102
eternityforest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a very good thing, otherwise you wouldn't be able to replace a router and have stuff just work.

Orrrrr the protocol would just be smart enough to say “hey, we are thinking of connecting to this network but the MAC address is different — did you recently switch base stations?”

As long as screenless devices and other unattended things like light bulbs didn't need manual intervention, and it was easy to turn off the checks on a Linux server, it would be cool.

But it would probably be an annoyance in large multi hotspot environments, and could become another thing to train people to mindlessly click through like cookie prompts.

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