Curious on suggestions for airtags, or similar, for tracking important things on flights or other cases where losing the specific item would be too much of a financial / sentimental loss. Anyone doing this from Linux, or from graphene? How is it?
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Unless there’s an open version, that’s not going to happen. They work by using networks of devices that participate in crowd scanning devices, then tracking devices on a proprietary hosted backend, which is the real product. .if somebody wants to build said backend that tracks millions or billions of these tags out in the world somehow, you’d need to first get all user of mobile phones of a particular OS or manufacturer to participate in scanning and providing you that data, which just won’t happen.
A reverse engineered sort of solution is Haystack, but it still uses Apples backend and devices.
So, if I want this I’ll just to accept the network as-is. Makes sense.
Well not just the network, it also doesn’t run on Linux, but I think that’s mostly just a matter of software…sort-of. Apple doesn’t have any sort of open API that I know of to be able to participate OR make requests for device tags. You still need an active Apple device that’s subscribed to the stupid iCloud or whatever they call it now, which is how you find devices in these networks.
So ething similar to this by for Android would probably be closer to what you’re angling for. There’s also plenty of BT devices that do proximity trackingnif you’re just looking for something around the house. This plus Home Assistant I believe can track tags in a local sense.
At the least, you could access Find My through the iCloud website, so you don’t need an Apple device to use the tracking interface.
As a fallback, I suppose one would have to run at least a MacOS virtual machine.
Bluetooth beacons are what you call these. There’s a few different app-based solutions, all of them proprietary as far as I’m aware, that connect to their brand of beacon regardless of its owner in order to update its position on the map. I feel like this should be possible to do in some way in an open manner, but I’d also be concerned about the security implications behind something like this. I wouldn’t want everyone to see where all of my most irreplaceable items are, after all.