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Anyone managing airtags from Linux? (discuss.online)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34586015

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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[–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Are there any (ideally waterproof) compact devices with long battery life (months~years)?

On the website I only found a long list of supported devices with brand name search and protocol type. grep showed no LoRaWAN devices though?

My use-case is theft tracking. I only need the device to be able to locate itself after a theft actually occurred and I request it remotely. (Perhaps also periodically with very low frequency.)

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Are there any (ideally waterproof) compact devices with long battery life (months~years)?

    I've mostly built my own, but I did order a SeeedStudio T1000-A a few weeks ago, and it's arriving next week.

    It's IP65 rated and estimated 4 months battery (with 1 hour updates). It also has WiFi that you can use with Google's geolocation API when GPS is unavailable.

    However like all LoRaWAN stuff, you do need coverage of a LoRaWAN provider. I use The Things Network since it partners with my city, but Helium is another option (although not currently supported by Traccar).

    On the website I only found a long list of supported devices with brand name search and protocol type.

    Traccar just supports The Things Network webhook API, in the TTN Mapper format (another tracking service, although public). Anything supported by TTN Mapper should work with Traccar.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Thank you!

    I've found the Seedstudio thing after posting this too and it looks like the thing I'd be looking for!

    What's your experience w.r.t. coverage?
    Obviously that highly depends on where exactly you are – you certainly aren't going to have coverage in the outback – but I'm mostly concerned with places where people actually go and would take my bag/laptop/bicycle to. 'Stralia is going to generally be quite different from Germany too of course but it would be a good reference point from which I could extrapolate.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    TBH, Australia is a bit of a mess, we used to use AS923, but we now use AU915, a lot of gateways are older (AS923), and some are newer (AU915), however AU915 is allowed to use more power, and AS923 is weaker.

    As for my experience, I had to buy a gateway for my house, but a train station near my workplace already had a gateway professionally setup, and my university has a gateway too. So anywhere I'd usually take my backpack has coverage.

    You can use a service called TTN Mapper to see the gateways near you with a heatmap to show their coverage.

    I've also just left a comment on the Traccar forums with some useful info regarding the T1000.

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