|
|
|
Charlotte is now trackable
Tuesday, December 10 2024
I got up so late this morning that when noon came, it seemed a little early to be eating lunch. But I did anyway, having a bowl of leftover minestrone soup from the InstantPot that I'd made for dinner. It was amazing, ranking up there with the best soups I have ever eaten. The spiciness had mellowed and there were none of the unpleasant notes from the Italian seasoning I'd detected yesterday. Of course, I'm not the first person to realize that, unlike anything you can get at a Taco Bell, soup is always better the next day.
This afternoon I decided to drive into town to run some errands. I'd managed to witness Neville pooping in the yard, so I had his samples to drop off at the vet. And there was a book for me to pick up for Gretchen at the Hurley library. I also needed some bits and pieces for the cabin, whenever I go there next. So before I can forget what those are, I visited Lowes (where Gretchen would prefer I shop if it's between Home Depot — run by fascists — or Lowes — possibly Black-owned). I needed better terminals for the fat wires I'm running to marine batteries and I needed better wire management in general. What I needed was terminal blocks, the kind where three or four conductors can be solidly joined together and kept separate from other wires destined for another terminal block. But Lowes didn't have great options for these, and what they had were expensive. (I suspect a lot of inflation has happened since the last time I went shopping for terminal blocks.)
While I was in the neighborhood, I thought I would also go to Adams Fairacre Farms for pizza-making supplies (and a can of cold-pressed coffee from Crosscut Coffee Company, my favorite impulse purchase in that place).
This afternoon, the tracker I'd ordered for Charlotte arrived, and I was eager to set it up and begin tracking. It's tracker by a British-based company called PitPat, and I did what they told me and downloaded an app called PitPat from Google Play. But when I tried to use that app to connect to the tracker, it kept failing. Was bluetooth not working on my phone? But I couldn't communicate with the tracker after installing the app on Gretchen's phone either. The instructions from the app was that I was supposed to make sure the tracker was on, but there were no buttons. In blinked in different ways, particularly when placed on its wireless charger. But what these blinks meant were a mystery.
Hours later I discovered that there are actually two different PitPats in the Google Store. The one I'd downloaded is called "PitPat," whereas the one I needed is called "PitPat Pet." The two PitPats do not seem to be related to each other at all, though they both connect to their respect tracking devices via an app. (The PitPat I'd downloaded first seemed to be some sort of jogging monitor.) Once I had the correct app installed, I took the tracker outside to see if it worked at all.
The way the PitPat tracker works is to mostly lie dormant, waking up and placing a call to its server via the cellphone network every five minutes. If it checks in and finds that I am looking for my dog, it then begins tracking, which involves turning on its GPS electronics and sending position data back to the server very frequently (every few seconds). Once I've found my dog, I turn off the active tracking and it goes to sleep. This method of operation uses so little data that all the cellular expenses for the life of the device are included in its $150 pricetag. It took the device a few minutes to wake up and start sending me location data, but when it did, it worked well enough for our needs, so it's looking like it's a keeper. Unfortunately, it doesn't show a path of your moving dog on a map; it just shows a generic dog icon at the last location the backend received. The only way to view tracker data is via a phone app, just another example of how the web that I love is being marginalized by the appification of everything. This makes the PitPat tracker much less entertaining than the Whistle tracker that we got for Neville back in 2016; that showed his little avatar following a series of connected line segments on a map, and that map could be viewed on a web page in addition to in the app. But the Whistle has a monthly cost, requires constant recharging, and tracks with a stingy five minute granularity.
Once I confirmed that the PitPat would work for us, I had Gretchen put the tracker on Charlotte's collar (she's too wary of me to let me do it!) and we no longer had to worry about her getting lost. This system will work fairly well around here in the southern Catskills, where cellular coverage is good. But it won't work that well in the Adirondacks, where we lose cellular coverage the moment we start going downhill from our cabin, which is higher than nearly all the land we hike on.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241210 feedback
previous | next |
