It could happen to anybody. You go on a hike. And along the way, you breadcrumb a few Mesh units to form a network so that you can stay in touch. But then it happens. You get back from your hike generally feeling good but tired, only to realize that you forgot a breadcrumbed Mesh THREE MILES OUT! Going back out to retrieve it is about the LAST thing you want to do. But you bite the bullet and slog out to get it.
Perhaps this could be avoided with some kind of proximity alert in the app. The location could be stored in your phone when you place the unit. And a reminder (such as a ringtone or vibrate) could come on when you come within a certain distance of the Gotenna to remind you to pick it up. How about it?
Are you physically leaving units along the trail as you hike? Do you hide them in a tree? Legit curious. When I’m hiking, I’m usually with a group, we all have one, and maybe a mesh relay at base camp if we were camping there.
I think the long term plans for the app are to have some sort of interface to ping and display relay node locations. When you drop a node, mark it on the map so it can broadcast a location to others.
I think your idea can be broadly added to an interesting feature called “Notify me when out of range”, so if I tap on a contact or a nearby node I can reach on the map, I can be notified if I go out of range before I send a message and discover that. This would definitely be a Gotenna Plus feature since it would have to auto-ping that device every “x seconds” to work. This would actually super useful. @Rahul_Subramany
There are apps that have similar functions. They send reminders to buy milk or whatever else when they detect you are at a certain place. Apps like that must be well written as they can eat the phones battery if poorly implemented.
That could eat the Gotennas battery faster and hog bandwidth although there could be tricks employed to reduce the number of pings. Thing’s like using distance traveled instead of just pings. If a unit isn’t moving it shouldn’t need to ping another unit as often. Two units moving in the same direction could reduce the frequency of pings over two units moving away from each other.
Acknowledgements might not be needed in every case. A system could be employed where units would take turns sending broadcasts and a ping that required acknowledgement would only be used when contact loss is suspected. Example: A unit missed a broadcast.
A great deal of thought would need to be put into these functions. It sounds like something that would go way down the list of priorities when considering desirability compared to cost of implementation. I’m not putting the idea down or anything. Hopefully we get lots of developers out there doing lots of cool stuff. I hope to see many interesting things built with the SDK in the future. I even have some ideas myself.
I actually don’t have any Gotennas at this point to breadcrumb, as I only have two (I just put in an order for a second two pack, but they are shipping). This whole idea just comes from the thought that it would be all too easy to forget your breadcrumbed Mesh units somewhere out there. As for placing a pin, this is certainly something that could be done. But that would not be of much use without some sort of warning that you are approaching your pin. Otherwise, it would just be easier than I would like to pass up your Gotenna.
Good points. Could offload ping when moved x from last location to phone. But also 90% of my use is day use and battery life isn’t a big concern in all cases.
Misplacing is not what I am worried about. It’s generally easy enough to find something like a Gotenna based on landmarks or even a dropped pin. My concern is FORGETTING to retrieve a Gotenna because, say, you had other things on your mind at the time or were chatting with your buddy. You get back to your car or (worse yet) 30 miles down the road, only to remember you forgot your Gotenna. This is why I think a proximity alert would be a good thing.
I understand that. I’m just suggesting an idea for a similar problem. Besides, what’s wrong with a feature that would help locate missing goTennas?
I also think the dropping pins when you initially setup your relay nodes is an option that already exists that solves your problem.