@rrhoover bluetooth has its security issues as well as interference issues too. Bluetooth and water don't mix given the wavelength etc..
Wifi carries frequency hopping battery issues. Every time you 'hop' from a wifi router to another one, it expends energy and also creates issues for the router too.
@rrhoover Great question. Tile works using bluetooth technology which has a 100 foot range. That means that to get real time positioning you would need 10s of thousands of Tile Apps running at the same time to cover a city the size of San Francisco. Not only is this very unlikely but during night time you would have no coverage when people are not walking around. We can cover a city the size of SF with as few as 10 Home Bases. The Home Base also allows other in-home sensors to be connected to the internet such as home security sensors and in the future we can also connect smoke detectors, flood sensors and much more.
@benwild10 I guess I'm misperceiving the data throughput of this sytem. I imagine it would be low data throughput scenarios based on your answer.
I'll probably wait for the price of these to go down.
@datarade Kumar, it is a low data rate system. If you could help spread the word to people that might be interested, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
@benwild10 Love the concept of the network of home bases extending the coverage, but that makes me wonder about security of having a child tracked, and having the location info pass through someone else's home base. What have you done to make sure privacy is protected for anything you put a tracker on?
The Iota Kickstarter campaign is aiming to build the first crowd-sourced internet of things (IoT) wireless network. Outdoor applications include pet,child,elderly and vehicle tracking while indoor applications include home security sensors, mailbox sensors and much more. Crowd-sourcing the network has many advantages over traditional cellular models. The main advantages are no monthly services fees and better battery life for the devices on the network.
@benwild10 This is very exciting stuff to be working on. You've assembled your kickstarter page nicely.
I had a few technical questions I couldn't find answers to on your page.
What frequencies do the IOTAs operate on?
How do you address interference issues?
Would you mind disclosing the BOM? Yeah, I'm one of those engineers. No worries either way.
How long does FCC certification take?
What you've built is a cognitive radio network technology of sorts. There's a lot of ways to hack this. (curious to get your CTO's thoughts on whether the system is vulnerable to any of these style of attacks?)
Super excited about this- Especially the child tracking angle. This is small enough it could be tied to a shoe in a inconspicuous area. I think some of the challenges will be around areas that likely will not have coverage- Such as rural highways and whatnot. I could see that being solved with car-powered mobile hotspots though. Cant wait to see what gets accomplished with this.
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@dbl I am really afraid for my kids. I realized that when they go out to school I am very very nervous. I thought that I should find a way to track them. I started my search and found this place called https://findmykids.org/blog/en/g... where I read all I need to know. I decided to buy a GPS tracker for my kids and now i can sleep well. I check where they are every hour and realize that doesn’t do anything wrong. They don’t go home after school but they just play on the football court or go and eat some cheeseburgers.I wish all our kids will live in a safe world.
@dbl We're also very excited about child tracking! Rural areas are a challenge although on the plus side, our range increases in rural areas so you need fewer Home Bases. We hope that many farmers can use the technology as well helping build up the rural coverage.
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