But now, under pressure from Apple's incredible Find My network, Google has started rolling out a similar service to modern Android phones. In theory it should be much better; Android has a higher market share than iOS in most parts of the world I'm interested in visiting. But Apple's monoculture means they can quickly roll out the network to a much higher range of devices than Google.

The Pebblebee "Universal" range works with both Apple and Android's networks. But, crucially, not at the same time. You can reset the device and swap it between your iPhone and Galaxy - but it won't connect to both networks simultaneously.

Hey, remember when Google and Apple collaborated so that Covid tracing apps were interoperable no matter the device? Good times, man! But, y'know, this is just for protecting property, not life. So we'll give them a pass…

This is what the Pebblebee Clip looks like.

It's a fairly unobtrusive small disk. Clip it to a thing with the included clip, hide it in the lining, glue it to a device. The logo is a clickable button which is used for pairing the device, resetting, and checking the battery.

It also comes with a ridiculously short USB-C-to-C cable which can only be used for charging.

Dump it and grab a longer cable from your big box of cables. Total e-Waste, shouldn't have been included.

When you tell the app to make the PebbleBee identify itself, you're rewarded with this display of loud beeps and disco lasers.

The lights are bright and the sound is piercing - especially considering its size. It fits neatly in a hand and is small enough to tuck away in a pocket.

But what's it like to use?

Pros

• USB-C rechargable. No more faffing about trying to find a new battery. No e-Waste. No worrying if it'll last an entire trip. Shove it into to any USB power source and you're good to go.
• Loud beeper. One of the main reasons I got this was that it (reportedly) has the loudest speaker on the market. I can't compare it to others but it is certainly good enough for hearing in a crowded train carriage.
• Lights. The sides light up - handy for giving you a visual cue as to where it is.
• Small, light, and includes a keyring connector.
• You can share trackers between accounts. My wife and I each have a suitcase. We don't just want to know where our own bag is - we both want to know where both bags are.

Cons

The downsides of the device are minimal - depending on your use case.

• Not waterproof. Certainly water resistant - but the USB-C socket is an ingress point for fluids.
• No Ultra Wide Band. That means you don't get a precise direction when looking for something - just the distance. UWB isn't supported on Google's "Find My Device" network right now, so this isn't a great loss.
• No wireless charging.
• Cost. Even in bulk, with a discount, they were £25 each.

Security

Anyone who finds your tracker can factory reset it. I can't help but feel there should be a way to prevent that. But, to be honest, if a thief has found your token they can just throw it away or destroy it.

Firmware updates aren't available in the Google Find My app. So you'll need to use Pebblebee's own app.

The USB-C port is for power only. They don't show up as a device when connected to a computer.

Testing

I wasn't able to connect to the PebbleBee using GrapheneOS - one of the downsides of using a hyper-secure version of Android.

I used a separate phone, but couldn't get the device to pair. I kept getting this message:

I had to go to Setting → Google → Devices → Scan for nearby devices. Only then could I add it to Find My Device.

The FMD service lets you share devices with another Google account. Perfect for families and loved ones! When I tried to use it, I got this error message on the GrapheneOS phone.

That's probably a GrapheneOS issue. But it is dissapointing these sorts of things aren't standardised and baked into the OS.

In terms of tracking - a bit crap. In Gatwick airport - a pretty busy destination - they stayed tracked for a bit after we dropped off our bags. But in less busy destinations, they never pinged the network. They claim a 150m range which ought to several times better than an AirTag. But without a critical mass of Android users opted-in to the network, it is pointless.

Privacy

I'm a bit of a privacy nut. There's no doubt that these can be used to stalk people - but the Find My app is supposed to alert you if it detect a tag following you.

Is having Google and Apple know where all your stuff is a good thing? Well, probably not. But if it is a choice between seeing where a thief has taken my laptop bag and a multinational knowing what train I took, I guess I'm surprisingly OK with it.

Yes, it is a Devil's Bargain. Location is useful for surveillance (be it advertising or police) but it is also useful for personal security. It isn't nice living in a Panopticon but it also isn't nice to lose your expensive possessions.

Verdict

From a tech point of view - they sort of work! BLE is now an established technology and is well supported on all modern phones. Google's "Find My" app is basic, but works at tracking your devices when they're near you. The device is loud, bright, and is quickly recharged.

If you have a phone that support it, they're a reasonable device. At £25 each, they are optimistically priced. Especially given the coverage issues.

And that's the crux of the issue. As of yet, the network simply isn't as expansive as the Apple version. Apple have the ability to push out a service to millions of users, Google don't. While there are more Android users (certainly in my part of the world) there isn't a mechanism to bootstrap this network.

Back in the day when Google was ambitious, they would have stuck sensors all around the country or ran a massive campaign encouraging people to get involved or launched a cool API or given out a million trackers as freebies. But Google is now a timid and cautious shadow of its former self. Everyone in tech half-expects the Find My Device network to join the Google Graveyard like so many other interesting projects.

So, for now, these are great if you're within a few hundred metres of them. And they're barely adequate under any other circumstances.

Here's my review from 5 years ago of the Chipolo BlueTooth tag. Amusingly, Apple have decided to go with a user-replaceable battery - unlike many of their other devices. I wonder why they didn't go for wireless charging - like the TinTag had a few years ago?

Anyway, the Apple involvement adds three significant things:

1. Better directional navigation. Rather than just telling you how far away from the thing you are, it tells you roughly where the thing is.
2. Improved community features. Having everyone with an iThing being able to find your lost puppy is a game-changer. Companies like Chipolo could never get that traction by themselves.
3. Higher price. Because Apple.

The first two are genuinely useful. First generation tags were able to give you distance and play a little noise. Good for Apple on innovating. With 40% of the UK having an iDevice there's a good chance that someone will walk by your dropped keys.

But the price...

I used the Chipolo and TinTag for a long time - but I couldn't justify the cost. I just don't lose my keys that often. Having them on my luggage was vaguely useful when disembarking from an aeroplane - but hardly essential. In any case, you still want a physical tag with something written on it for people who don't have the right app.

I used Physical Web Tokens which also suffered from the same flaw - overpriced and inaccessible to the majority of people

Is £25 a reasonable price for insurance if you ever lose your bag, keys, or pet? Maybe. And I'm sure the PR teams will shortly begin churning out feel-good stories about how lost dogs were reunited with distraught owners thanks to the magic of Apple.

But do people lose valuable stuff that often? I want to know where I put the spare HDMI cable. Or which cupboard has the nutmug. Or who borrowed my favourite mug. No one is bunging a pony down for that.

I long for the world envisaged by Cory Doctorow in his book Makers - where smart tags are cheap as dirt and ubiquitous.

“One of the big barriers to roommate harmony is the correct disposition of stuff. When you leave your book on the sofa, I have to move it before I can sit down and watch TV. Then you come after me and ask me where I put your book. Then we have a fight. There’s stuff that you don’t know where it goes, and stuff that you don’t know where it’s been put, and stuff that has nowhere to put it. But with tags and a smart chest of drawers, you can just put your stuff wherever there’s room and ask the physical space to keep track of what’s where from moment to moment.

...

He reached for his computer and asked it to find him the baseball gloves. Two of the drawers on the living-room walls glowed pink. He fetched the gloves down, tossed one to Lester, and picked up his ball.

We're a little way off that dream at the moment. RFID tags are getting pretty cheap - but they're short range. You'd need a network of high-powered sensors in a room to be able to do basic location finding.

So, a hearty well-done to Apple for getting in to the physical location game. Let's hope it re-energises the sector and drives the cost down to ubiquity.

A couple of months ago I was giving a talk in Romania - the organisers had set up a technology expo showing off some great local start-ups.

One which caught my eye was TinTag.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Tintag is pretty clever. BLE beacon but has built in Qi recharging. Very useful. thetintag.com
#DevTalks pic.x.com/sjizdew274

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I've previously reviewed the Chipolo - which is a similar beacon/tracker. So I thought I'd give this one a go.

At the airport last week, I put the Chipolo on my luggage and was able to detect when it came onto the baggage carousel. I used the buzzer to quickly locate my bag. These BLE beacons work with any modern smartphone and are quickly becoming indispensable.

So, how does TinTag stack up against Chipolo?

Pros

• Blinken Lights!
• No need to create an account.
• Buzzer.
• Waterproof.
• Sturdy.
• Wireless Charging.

Cons

• Cost is €29 / £22 + shipping. That's €5 more than the Chipolo. Although you do get the charging pad and USB cable.
• Lanyard hole is a little small.
• 4 month battery life which requires an overnight charge.
• Yet another app to install!
• No open source API that I could find.

Verdict

I think I prefer the TinTag to the Chipolo.

Yes, the TinTag is slightly larger - but it is sturdier and recharges using the same pad I use for my phone. Flashing LEDs are nice, and you don't need to register on the website to get all the functionality.

The app isn't brilliant - and I suspect BLE tracker support will eventually be built in to Android - but it does the job.

It's too big for a wallet or phone - but the perfect size for luggage, handbags, coats, and larger pets.

The TinTag is available to buy now.

The Chipolo is a multi-purpose Bluetooth Low Energy tag. It's like a high-tech version of one of those things which you attach to your keyring which will beep when whistled at.

As the box says, it will work up to 60 meters away. It'll beep when you lose it, and it can make your phone beep if someone moves it out of range - handy if someone is stealing your wallet. What's not mentioned on the box is the fact that it has a temperature sensor. No, I've no idea why either.

The contents of the box are sparse, but functional. Two batteries, a keyring, and a basic instruction leaflet.

Let's take a look at how it is set up and used.

The Chipolo Android app gets poor reviews, but the Chipolo team are very responsive and working hard on improving it. I found that the app crashed a couple of times and didn't seem particularly intuitive. It performs its basic tasks well enough - showing me how far away the beacon was and making it beep when triggered.

Cost

The base cost of the Chipolo is €25 each - plus €9 shipping! That feels like quite a hefty price - especially considering that generic BLE finder tags cost around €10 delivered on AliExpress.

If you buy a 9 pack, the Chipolos work out at €22.22 each. A reasonable discount, but they're not a cheap.

Update! You can get 20% off the price using my referral link.

Open Source

There are a couple of 3rd party Open Source packages, one for NODE-Red and an older one for NodeJS.

The only Open Source provided by Chipolo themselves seems to be for translating their website.

Final Thoughts

The Chipolo is quite a cool device. If you're constantly losing your keys or wallet, I can see how useful it could be. They also suggest that the tracker could be attacked to a pet's collar. But given how fragile the device is, the lack of range, and the fact it is not waterproof, it's hard to see it as a practical choice.

For the price, I'd have expected a much more robust device. It does feel like it will fall apart quite easily.

There are some rather "forced" features. I doubt anyone is going to shake the Chipolo to take a selfie - but it does show that it could work as a motion sensor alarm. I also struggle to see the use of the temperature sensor.

Theoretically, if you lose your Chipolo then other users' phones can sense it and automagically tell you where it is. Frankly that's going to rely on a critical mass of users which just isn't here yet.

It works and, providing the 6 months battery life prediction is accurate, should be a useful addition to my growing stash of gadgets.

You can buy branded Chipolo smart tags direct from the manufacturer.

You can get 20% off the price using my referral link

The one problem with the beacon I have is that it has an exposed button. Every time it got bumped in my pocket, the token would emit a couple of shrill beeps and set itself into config mode. After a couple of months, the CR2032 battery died.

Replacing the battery is easy - but let's crack the casing open to see what powers this wee beastie!

There's no obvious way in - but several months of being in my pocket has shifted the top sticker. Apply a little heat and it peals right off.

Hurrah! Standard screws! No pentalobes or other weird things. What's that in the top right? An LED window! Covered up by the sticker and, it seems, disabled in the firmware.

The casing lifts off and the circuit board pops out easily.

Two things become apparent - the left third of the board is completely unpopulated, and there's a massive KLJ-1230 buzzer on the bottom. With those two removed, the circuit would be around the same size as the coin cell powering it.

Time to dive underneath that sticker and see its brains.

It's the CSR 1010 BLE chip.

Finally, flip it over and see what mysteries the back holds.

As well as the battery connector, we have an SPI Bus - presumably for flashing the ROM and/or debugging.

And that's all there is to it.

Personally, I'd have jettisoned the speaker and used the LED to indicate if the beacon was ready to be overwritten.

After replacing the battery, I snipped off the plastic button, and reassembled the unit. I covered up the hole with a little tape. Now the beacon can't be put into pairing mode accidentally and, as a consequence, the battery life should be much improved.

Now all I need to find is someone with the Physical Web app so I can share my business card ?

Now the place was spotless -- and what's more, it was minimalist. The floor was not only clean, it was visible. Lining the walls were translucent white plastic tubs stacked to the ceiling.

"You like it?"

"It's amazing," she said. "Like Ikea meets Barbarella. What happened here?"

Tjan did a little two-step. "It was Lester's idea. Have a look in the boxes."

She pulled a couple of the tubs out. They were jam-packed with books, tools, cruft and crud -- all the crap that had previously cluttered the shelves and the floor and the sofa and the coffee table.

"Watch this," he said. He unvelcroed a wireless keyboard from the side of the TV and began to type: T-H-E C-O. . . The field autocompleted itself: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, and brought up a picture of a beaten-up paperback along with links to web-stores, reviews, and the full text. Tjan gestured with his chin and she saw that the front of one of the tubs was pulsing with a soft blue glow. Tjan went and pulled open the tub and fished for a second before producing the book.

"Try it," he said, handing her the keyboard. She began to type experimentally: U-N and up came UNDERWEAR (14). "No way," she said.

"Way," Tjan said, and hit return, bringing up a thumbnail gallery of fourteen pairs of underwear. He tabbed over each, picked out a pair of Simpsons boxers, and hit return. A different tub started glowing.

"Lester finally found a socially beneficial use for RFIDs. We're going to get rich!"

"I don't think I understand," she said.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get to the junkyard. Lester explains this really well."

He did, too, losing all of the shyness she remembered, his eyes glowing, his sausage-thick fingers dancing.

"Have you ever alphabetized your hard drive? I mean, have you ever spent any time concerning yourself with where on your hard drive your files are stored, which sectors contain which files? Computers abstract away the tedious, physical properties of files and leave us with handles that we use to persistently refer to them, regardless of which part of the hard drive currently holds those particular bits. So I thought, with RFIDs, you could do this with the real world, just tag everything and have your furniture keep track of where it is."

Cory Doctorow - Makers

There have been some attempts to build this system - but one of the major problems it suffers with is range. Even if you are diligent and always put your socks back in a drawer you still might have problems given that typical RFID tags have a range of a few centimetres.

This got me thinking - would Bluetooth low energy be a better solution?

I've found some BLE "Key Finders" on Amazon for £3.

They're a bit bigger and bulkier than RFID - and they require an (albeit long-life) battery to work - but they do have some advantages.

• Range of up to 100 metres. Means the locating software can be built into a stand-alone device rather than into storage tubs.
• In-built speaker - so they can emit a sound when you want to locate them.
• Potentially the ability to include the objects into The Physical Web.
• Two-way communications. Press the button on the tag and have something happen.
• Data about the tag can also be sent - temperature, weight, orientation, etc.

So, that might be an interesting project to make :-)

I notice that Moo are now selling NFC enabled business cards. As regular readers know, I'm not a great fan of NFC - mostly because it's so expensive. The NFC cards are £1.20 each - the regular cards cost just 26p each!

What if we change the idea of what a business card is? Why do I need to hand over a physical bit of dead tree in order to exchange contact information? That's dumb.

Last week I was at the Over The Air hackference. While there, I was lucky enough to grab a few "Physical Web" beacons from Ilario Gressi of Google.

Is there some way to turn them into a high-tech business card?

Yes. Yes there is.

What Is An iBeacon?

There are a lot of misconceptions around iBeacons. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a version of Bluetooth which is specifically designed to be efficient at broadcasting small amounts of data.

An iBeacon simply transmits an ID number via BLE. That's it. When your phone hears the broadcast, it looks up the ID and does something with it. The typical use case is that it alerts your Coffee Shop's app as to which branch you are in.

Google's Physical Web project does something much more interesting with iBeacon technology. Rather than just broadcasting an ID, it (ab)uses the Advertising Packets to broadcast a URl!

How It Works

I carry around a Physical Web beacon on my keyring. I've programmed it with the URl of my .tel website. It spends all day broadcasting that message via BLE.

If you have Android's Physical Web app, or iOS Chrome - your phone should display a persistent notification showing all the nearby beacons.

Or, you can open up the app and see a list of nearby beacons.

One click (either in notification or app) and it takes you directly to a website with my digital business card.

Fantastic!

Issues

The Physical Web specification is still evolving - and this BLE Business Card idea isn't without problems.

• Beacons are expensive. Around £20 each - or US$50 for 3. More expensive than NFC, but you keep the beacon rather than hand them out.
• URl length is limited to 144 bits. That's really short. I've suggested using a 7-bit alphabet, but it seems that the preferred solution is to use a URl shortener.
• Web addresses only. You can't directly embed an email address, phone number, or BitCoin link - just web.
• Limited hardware support. Just like NFC - you need a phone with the right chips in it. And you need an app. (*mutters darkly about how QR codes only need a camera lens. And an app...*)
• Battery life. BLE beacons should last 2 - 5 years on a single coin cell. NFC has no battery - it is powered by the phone - so should last forever. Similarly, QR Codes will last ask long as their ink sticks to paper.
• Size. A Physical Web beacon isn't small. Not as big a business card holder, true, but not quite small enough for a key-ring.
• Business cards, for all their faults, provide a physical memento of an interaction. A ritualised exchange takes place which, culturally, may carry more semantic weight than merely scanning the æther for nearby signals.
• Finally, I'm pretty cool being the only person in the room with a BLE Business Card - but what's it like when everyone has one? At the conference we set up loads of Physical Web beacons at once - and the app quickly became full of every beacon in a 75m radius:
  
  Theoretically, the app will sort by whichever signal is the strongest - which should mean that if I'm standing next to you, your app will pick my card first. But no guarantees.

So, not perfect - but certainly a neat way to broadcast your identity to nearby people. With BLE making its way into more and more devices, it's certainly possible that it will overtake NFC as the primary way to discover and exchange data.

I encourage you to contribute to the Physical Web spec and apps, as well as to EddyStone which is part of the underlying technology. You can buy Physical Web beacons or, if you're feeling adventurous, build your own BLE beacons.

Energy efficiency is the next battleground for electronics. As the price of electricity soars, people will become less and less enamoured with charging their devices every single day. Even if cold-fusion brings us unlimited free energy - plugging your gadgets into a wall just seems so primitive!

That's where BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) comes in. It's an ultra low powered transmitter which can be found in FitBits, iBeacons, pacemakers, and all sorts of other devices.

The key, as per its name, is that it uses very little energy. A simple watch battery should be enough to power an iBeacon for a year.

When Life Gives You Lemons…

Today was one of The Lab's regular hackdays. We challenge ourselves to spend a day playing with new technology, trying to get it to do something interesting.

I'm sure you remember from school building a simple power source using a lemon or potato. Zinc plated nails, copper wiring, an acid source, and - hey presto - a lightbulb comes on.

So, can we harness the awesome power of fruit to bring life to a little iBeacon?

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

A vital part of today's hackday in @thelab_uk.... :-) #blemon (@ Sainsbury's) 4sq.com/1iCOUKo pic.x.com/ejidwromyx

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We used RedBear Lab's BLE Mini board. It can be powered via USB (boring!) or via a direct electrical contact on the back.

Better BlueTooth Through Chemistry

It's been ages since any of us in The Lab did basic physics and chemistry at school, so we turned to the Mighty Internet for help.

With three lemons wired in parallel, we got approximately 0.5 Volts and 120μAmps.

According to Red Bear's support forum, we'd need about 3 volts and 340μAmps.

With 6 lemons, we were at ~200μAmps, closing in on the figure we needed.

It occurred to us that we may need to construct some kind of super-fruit mega battery in order to get the voltage up as well. I really wish I'd paid more attention in GCSE physics. Sorry Mrs Perkins…

10 is the Magic Number

With 10 C. limon in parallel, we hit 369μAmps! Perfect!

That still wasn't enough to get the BLE Mini board to power up - we needed to raise the voltage. But how?

Errr…. with difficulty…! Turns out it's really frickin' hard to get enough power out of a bunch of lemons to power modest hardware.

So we did what any enterprising startup does - pivot!

Power Extreme!

Ok, so can our juicers deliver sufficient juice to act as an emergency battery for your smartphone?

We found the lowest powered phone we could - the GeeksPhone Keon - running FireFox OS.

In keeping with our fruit theme, we butchered an old BlackBerry charger - and got to work…

Wires stripped, plugged into our lemon battery… What was the result?

Errr… The square root of nowt! Nothing happened. The power wasn't high enough for the phone's charging circuitry to register anything.

We grabbed a Nexus 5, installed a power monitor widget, and tried again.

Ooooooh!

This is the very definition of trickle charging. The amount of energy from 10 lemons, zinc plated nails, and copper wire is just enough to give you a few more minutes of talk time - nothing more. In a MacGyver situation, you're probably better off squeezing the lemons into your enemies' eyes.

Lessons Learned

Hackdays are a great way of playing about with technology and having a bit of experimental fun.

It's temping to think BLE is so efficient that it can be powered from harvested kinetic energy and stray WiFi beams - that's not the case. Modern battery technology is pretty complex - and that's why tiny button cells can power modern electronics and a whole bunch of lemons doesn't even get close.

One of the reasons The Lab exists in O2 is to develop a culture of "Fast Failure". We didn't spend millions of Euros and half-a-dozen months in planning meetings, requesting proposals from suppliers, and updating PowerPoint decks to do this - instead, two of us spend half a day actually trying to build something and finding out pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work.

For those of you wondering just how much of your monthly bill we spent on this? The cost was a couple of quid for the nails and wire, and we had the multimeter already. The lemons cost £3.00 for 10. I wonder if I should have splashed out on organic ones…. ;-)

What's Next

It's possible to power Xmas tree lights from hundreds of Brussels Sprouts. Would it be possible to set up a "Charge your Apple with apples" stand at one of O2's larger stores? Sure! It could make a great marketing stunt - and teach people a little basic science - but, for now, I'll stick to my wall socket.

Toodle pip!