StickNFind – Bluetooth Powered ultra small Location Stickers(indiegogo.com) |
StickNFind – Bluetooth Powered ultra small Location Stickers(indiegogo.com) |
Also. I think it's a really cool idea and I want one. I would use one to secure a suitcase on a bus from getting nicked when they stop to let someone off.
I missed details on how the pairing works, for privacy reasons it seems desirable that the tags are locked to (preferably a set of) cell phones.
Some more information about the battery would be nice too, what counts as "usage" for the tag exactly, and do they expose any idea of the battery's state? It would be nice to know that a tag is nearing it's projected end-of-battery, I guess.
Also didn't much enjoy the example with tagging the wife's car. Bleh.
These are one step closer.
Also, I really hope some of that money goes towards hiring a designer to polish their apps and branding. They certainly have the tech side covered, but style goes a long way. See: Nest.
It remains to be seen exactly how far they are willing to go with unregistered protocols and custom hardware, but this type of "electronic leash" is an officially blessed protocol, so there should be no issues with their app.
Still hope they tune up the design, though. Even beyond aesthetics, the usability leaves a lot to be desired.
They should be able to use the gyro/accelerometer to give their radar 'direction' as well no? You would just need to move around slightly for it to combine the data with the BT signal distance.
Guess it depends on the BT distance resolution.
Which would actually be a pretty cool project for someone: create a system for triangulating the approximate location of stuff in your house with strategically-placed fixed Bluetooth LE devices ("stuff" in the degenerate case meaning powered-up BLE hardware like an iPhone, or with these sorts of tags, things like keys and pets). Sort of like this project but wit less of the "getting warmer…getting colder" hide-and-seek aspect.
They're still a bit expensive, but I'm hoping the price will approach $1 each in a couple years.
i'm also using a network of hacked seagate dockstars w/ bluetooth usb dongles hidden around the house to detect which part of the house our cellphones are in.
i'm already plotting what i can use these stickers for :)
This would at least give you a compass heading that you could use when integrating the accelerometer data to give some kind of course over time.
It'd be pretty unreliable though and add a lot of cost.
I'm not great at geometry but I figure it should be possible. Not sure about accuracy though.
The sensors in your phone won't help to work out where the sticker is. The bluetooth receiver in it is built to detect signals from any direction, so even if you rotate your phone, that doesn't help to work out which direction the signals are arriving from.
I'd imagine you could get a rough location, but you'd need to go through some kind of calibration process first that involved going into different rooms/zones and telling the software where you were.
You might need extra reference sensors too. Ones that are in known locations that the system can use to scale the signal strength readings. That might help to combat some of the issues I mentioned above.
If you know the movement of the phone, you can determine which direction of movement causes the largest increase in signal strength change. So the app would be basically doing what you do to find something (let me move this way, oh I'm colder, I should go the other way) but at a higher spatial and temporal resolution.