[HN Gopher] How the Totem Compass Works
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How the Totem Compass Works
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-08-10 22:01 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.totemlabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.totemlabs.com)
| alberth wrote:
| Is this effectively "Find My", but as a special purpose device?
| sdoering wrote:
| Yes. With a lot of interesting tech, that - as per the article
| - allows for a better reach and experience (and stability of
| the situation). Not sure about their claims, though.
|
| But a cool writeup nonetheless imho.
| tjoff wrote:
| The title doesn't lie. I've scrolled about a kilometer and I've
| learned everything from GNSS, mesh networks, how to pair units
| and privacy implications.
|
| But I have absolutely no idea what is is.
|
| What does it _do_? Why would anyone want one?
|
| So it seems it has a vibe mode and a compass mode. You can pair
| with four other totems and if you tilt it up you can find them.
| How? I don't know but supposedly the arrow get's brighter when
| you point it in the right direction maybe?
|
| Vibe mode blinks with the music.
| sdoering wrote:
| I read the article and it beautifully explained that it is a
| tool for people at public gatherings like festivals to easily
| be able to find each other. And to be able to alert friends to
| find one of one would feel uneasy in a situation.
|
| The direction of your paired friends is indicated by the max.
| Four lights at the outer ring. The compass tracks the direction
| you are going towards and this way, by aligning the "needle"
| with the target light it leads you to your friend.
| partdavid wrote:
| Step 2 is: you go where we say.
| falcolas wrote:
| They're for keeping track of and finding friends at events like
| raves or big concerts. I don't know if this one does, but
| others have an "I'm in distress" feature that alerts all their
| friends as well.
|
| Disclaimer: I've never used one. Well, honestly, I've never
| been to a rave or huge concert, so I'm not the target audience.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Yeah, they've got an SOS button on the back that'll
| (silently) make your friends' devices blink to say "come find
| me." Not sure how noticeable it would be on the dance floor
| without a noise or vibrate, though.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I had that same issue. (To be fair, this is a deep link to the
| page explaining how it works, not what it is.)
|
| Anyway, the main page explains it: https://www.totemlabs.com/
|
| Basically you and several friends get these devices, go to a
| festival or event together, and it helps you find physically
| find each other. The display indicates which direction they are
| relative to you.
|
| This means you don't have to play the "let's meet back here in
| 90 minutes" game.
|
| Obviously you can just use a cell phone, but that only works if
| there's good coverage.
| lbourdages wrote:
| In large events (100k+ people within a square km or so) cell
| phone networks often get saturated to the point of not
| working anymore. You can have 5 bars but not be able to
| download anything because the cell site is overloaded.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Theme park + teens seems like a use case.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Strangely, I found the image at the beginning to be very
| informative: (https://cdn.prod.website-
| files.com/65e4ed3b65febd941c403512/...)
|
| Each person's device shows the bearing to each other person's
| device, based on color. You can find other people with linked
| devices, and the UI looks dead simple after pairing is
| complete.
| generalizations wrote:
| Go to the homepage. https://www.totemlabs.com/ The OP article
| looks much more like something to read if you know what it is,
| and want to know how the engineering team pulled it off.
| RIMR wrote:
| It looks like it lets you send very low-information signals
| that allows you to ping, check status for, and navigate to
| other device-holders you are paired with.
|
| It seems interesting, but I think it could use smartphone
| pairing and chat capabilities to actually get off the ground.
|
| Also, for a device intended for festivals, fall is a poor
| release date. Most of the year's festivals will be concluded.
| observationist wrote:
| So how did they solve the "horrible people exist and will use
| this to stalk and murder their victims" problem?
|
| Normalizing these types of things is not great, imo, and I'm
| not sure even Apple has pulled it off yet, with their airtags.
| Any tech that is tracking and surveilling you can be used to
| track and surveil you, and any company that doesn't explicitly
| say "we will not harvest, monetize, abuse, or otherwise misuse
| your data" will harvest and sell your data, using "industry
| standard" anonymization or other techniques to sell a false
| sense of security. Any bits of data you give away are bad, but
| gps style realtime location tracking is dangerous as hell.
|
| Phones are bad enough - not sure I appreciate the niche this is
| filling, or why "even more robust" tracking that works when
| phones don't is a positive.
|
| Plan ahead, use walkie talkies with your buddies if there's no
| phone service, or so on, the potential for harm from this tech
| seems to heavily outweigh any ephemeral convenience.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Oh great! Someone (Garmin?) used to have a fully off grid group
| locator like this, but they stopped selling it pretty quickly.
| This kind of thing is very useful when cell coverage is poor
| (i.e. put one on your dogs collar). There are times when you
| can't rely on the cell network and, for those cases, these kinds
| of devices are super useful. I don't really care for the "party"
| features but if I can buy 4 of them and each one can display how
| to get to the other device, it would be amazing!
| sdoering wrote:
| That's actually a great idea. Especially as one is already
| cheaper than those yearly subscriptions for a dog tracker (at
| least in Germany). Sadly they are a bit too big to put on our
| one cat that always roams a bit far. ;-)
| loulouxiv wrote:
| The radio has a range of max 1km. If there are no other
| devices in range to extend your reach by mesh routing, you
| will quickly lose track of your pet... Maybe with a lower
| band radio and/or a Lora-like transmission technique these
| could have been made with a higher range but 1km seems ok for
| a festival setting
| aeturnum wrote:
| There are use cases where 1km is too short (and Garmen does
| make dedicated, multi-gps trackers for hunting with dogs),
| but for many run of the mill use cases (i.e. losing your
| dog on a hike) it seems great.
| slicktux wrote:
| Interesting, it seem the GPS is is used for getting location of
| totems and it then shares the location with other linked totems
| via Mesh. Then a simple calculation is used for getting initial
| bearing and as you rotate the totem (which I'm sure has a
| magnetometer)the lights brighten as you get closer to the
| bearing! Nice!
| esel2k wrote:
| Looks interesting from the tech perspective. I was nearly going
| to buy two for my kids. We don't go to festivals but now and then
| on larger events and a fun toy.
|
| But looking at the size I am a bit hesitant. Airtag does the job
| and soon they will have a cellphone...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| No affiliation, stumbled upon it and thought it was a cool mashup
| of GNSS, mesh networking, and the presentation layer/UX. I hope
| you find reading about it as enjoyable as I did.
| rmah wrote:
| I read the first few pages and couldn't figure out what it
| actually does. All it talks about is how it "works" without
| saying what "works" means to the users of the device. Very
| frustrating.
| grugagag wrote:
| This is quite cool. Being with a couple of friend in a large
| gathering this is probably useful to find eachother as it gives
| you the direction to where they are. I'd try this if I ever found
| myself in this predicament.
| deepsun wrote:
| Sounds cool, but every time I tried something "mesh", it was
| very-very slow and buggy.
|
| In this particular case, each device must act as a cell tower,
| but even advanced cell towers have connection capacity, how is it
| solved here? Also, cell towers have unlimited battery.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm more concerned that I would end up being the only one with
| a compass.
|
| Got a Meshtastic radio, set it up in Omaha, Nebraska ...
| crickets.
| NathanielBaking wrote:
| Like other posters, I read the whole thing and couldn't think of
| a reason for this device. I have experienced the many people cell
| issue but I am old enough to remember a time before cell phones
| at concerts.
|
| This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.
| kortex wrote:
| > This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.
|
| My friends and I independently came up with this exact idea at
| the most recent regional burn event, specifically to better
| coordinate meeting back up after wandering, and then discovered
| this device, so it's very much a real problem in need of
| solving.
|
| Concerts are usually pretty easy to find your friends after
| splitting up. They are usually at the bar, restrooms, or a
| handful of viewing spots or seats. Big raves, music festies,
| burns, and other large gatherings are spread over a much wider
| area.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I get what you're saying, however, after attending Austin City
| limits Music Festival, where at any given time there can he 70K
| or more people in attendance, trying to find my wife, who was
| watching a different band at a different stage then me, can be
| a struggle to meet back up. (Especially after the band is
| finished and people start shuffling to the next stage for
| another band.)
|
| It's also very confusing for a person who isn't very direction
| savvy. For this reason alone, I'm definitely going to look into
| these compasses.
| eitally wrote:
| Think of it as "Find My" but without having to rely on random
| people's iPhones to detect your tracker. There are pros & cons
| to each. In general, I think it boils down to this:
|
| 1. Find My networks are great when you're trying to find a
| thing 2. Totem-style GPS-based devices are great when you're
| trying to find a person who might be able to react to a ping
|
| The problem I think Totem has is that the use case is pretty
| limited and the cost per unit is probably pretty high. It's
| basically the inverse product of Yondr[1], which also has a
| pretty high cost for what it does. As a parent of three, and
| also as a dad who regularly travels with tween/teen soccer
| teams, have an easy way to interactively track kids would be
| very helpful sometimes. I see Totem as a highly feature-reduced
| Garmin InReach but with a much more intuitive UX for the
| singular use case it serves.
|
| [1] https://www.overyondr.com/phone-free-schools
| throw7 wrote:
| pretty cool, seems to be purpose built for festival enviroments;
| there's an SOS feature too. hope it works well... mesh networks
| can be tricky and kind of slow.
| zxcvgm wrote:
| When I initially watched the demo video, I was wondering how the
| devices might locate each other. I thought it was using ultra
| wide band (UWB) like iPhones but now I see it's just GPS. I'm not
| sure how many of these events are indoors vs outdoors, but it
| definitely won't work indoors. Wonder how they might try to make
| it work indoors if there's no additional hardware onboard.
| mmooss wrote:
| A device can't locate other devices via GPS (GNSS apparently,
| which includes GPS and other systems); it can only locate
| itself. GNSS is only a receiver; there's no way to transmit
| unless you have a satellite. [0]
|
| Having located itself, the device has to transmit its location
| to other Totem Compasses via other means. It says it uses 2.4
| GHz spectrum and some stripped down, low-latency protocol (why
| does low-latency matter here?).
|
| [0] I can setup a local cellular transmitter; has anyone tried
| setting up a GPS transmitter and hack it to send other useful
| information besides PNT? Yes, I know you can send misleading
| PNT info; I'm talking about doing something useful.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| See also Meshtastic for greater capabilities but same off grid
| approach. Additionally, if this isn't a LoRa radio underneath
| I'll be stunned.
| archsurface wrote:
| "a new era for festivals and live events ... designed to give
| people freedom. Freedom to roam, freedom to dance. Freedom from
| fear & uncertainty."
|
| Fear and uncertainty at a festival? Aren't they supposed to be
| fun? I humbly suggest someone in fear at a festival should be at
| a therapy session tackling their agoraphobia or anxiety instead
| of playing with a glow in the dark p2p gps? Maybe festivals have
| changed since I last went to one, and I don't even like them.
| riffraff wrote:
| I've routinely gotten lost from my friends at festivals, and
| while I wasn't scared, I would have liked being able to find
| them again.
|
| I suppose for young girls the feeling of unsafety might be
| bigger than it ever was for me, as a boy.
|
| Edit: there's also the anxiety on the other side. What if you
| lose track of your younger sibling/drunk friend/child? It would
| be nice to be able to find them again without freaking out.
| robryk wrote:
| I wonder if they intend to measure pressure and display altitude
| difference (or at least its sign) at some point. (That could be
| very helpful when skiing.)
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Back in my day... never mind.
| yazzku wrote:
| Good ol' pissing on the side of the tree. Lasts longer than any
| battery and also wards potential predators off. Dog approves.
| Spice up that smell with a caramel macchiato add-on if you're
| into startups.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I don't want to buy, but I really like this as a rental device.
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