mergeconflict254
Frank: [00:00:00] Frank. 
James: [00:00:09] I heard that you got a little surprise in the mail recently. 
Frank: [00:00:14] I didn't even get it in the mail. I went into the outside world, James. Like what the four 
James: [00:00:19] times, what is that? What was it like? 
Frank: [00:00:22] It was odd and had lots of weird lines and posters and stuff like that. I did, I bought a device. I couldn't help myself.
I wanted an Airtech to play with and I wasn't smart, like everyone else on the internet and order them online. So I did what lazy people do and see if there were any available in the store. And guess what? There are, there are a whole bunch available in the store. So I went out to the outside 
James: [00:00:51] land in an Apple store.
Is that where you went like to a legitimate Apple store? 
Frank: [00:00:56] Yeah, our Apple store is a little bit funny here. It's at the U district. Um, that's not what I meant to say. I meant to say university village it's it used to be a nice app store and then it became a ridiculous Apple store, you know, like all giant glass windows and glass doors and pavilions.
It's it's. Ridiculous. And it was finished just when the pandemic started. So I've only been in at once, but what they've done and they got pretty lucky here, they built a giant outdoor, um, I don't even know what to call it, landing for you, whatever. And they've turned that into kind of an outside Apple store and they do a really nice job.
Um, everything's kind of by appointment. So in the app, you buy something, you schedule an appointment. I'm sure people have gone through this, but I hadn't gone through this. I found it all kind of interesting, um, show up at the thing, put a mask on, get shuffled around. Just like you're at an airport. Feels very much like being at an airport and eventually they give you products after enough rigmarole.
James: [00:02:05] Nice. Then what project did you get? 
Frank: [00:02:08] About myself and air tag. Just one, 
James: [00:02:11] just one, just a solo solo dolo. 
Frank: [00:02:15] Yeah. Yeah. So the, the fun thing about these are you're supposed to get on like personalized. So I totally, in a better mode, I would have ordered a bunch online and. Pick some cute emojis or put my initials on them or something really vain like that.
Yeah. But I didn't do that. I have one with an Apple logo. We'll call it the OEM air tag. And I got it just because I wanted to know how these things work kind of from a developer's perspective. I, I w when we were talking about, um, on the show, I was really finding. Hard use cases for it. I'm like, I don't think I actually need one of these, but eventually curiosity got the cat and I just wanted to get one.
And I'm hoping to, uh, I wanted to talk about it on the show. 
James: [00:03:02] Yeah, I was super on the fence. I literally had it, my, my mouse hovered over the buy button and I was like, do I really need this? Should I have this? Where am I going to put it? I don't even leave the house. 
Frank: [00:03:13] No, I know. So that was the funniest part.
I'm like, what do I take when I leave the house? It's true. I feel like I'm going on a trip, you know, I'm like, do I pack I, should I bring luggage? . 
James: [00:03:29] Yeah, it's a, it's a conundrum. It is a, it is a, uh, Real-world it's going to be really weird for the next six months. I was like, it's been awkward for the last 12 months, so 
Frank: [00:03:41] yeah, but it's even more awkward now because we're transitioning into normality and that's just going to be so strange.
So anyway, as I transitioned to normality, I thought I'd get a, a, a range finding device and all of that, and I'm happy to report. I, I like it. It works pretty well. I'm going to actually turn it on here and see if we can get some cool fully what we hear it. 
James: [00:04:03] Well, I 
Frank: [00:04:04] heard it. Okay. Little, fully, a cute little, uh, it's like a little hunk of white plastic that just barely hugs that CR 2032 battery with a little cap on the backside.
I didn't even get any of the accessories to clip it to anything. So I've just been flipping it around, like a quarter in my bag and in my pocket, just messing around like that. So I really got bare bones stuff over here. 
James: [00:04:32] Nice. Now here's the thing with these little devices is they remind me of another device, Frank, that I was a champion of for many years.
Maybe like fuzz is five, six years ago, maybe, uh, things called iBeacons. Have you heard of these things? Remember these? 
Frank: [00:04:51] We still have them. We still have API APIs for them. They just haven't taken off the way. We're all kind of hoping, right. They just, um, We were hoping that all stores would do like the Amazon go store where you just walk into the store, steal something and walk out, and then your credit card gets charged.
And we're all hoping for that future. It hasn't come yet, but I think it's still coming. I, you know, I remember in 2004, I think I bring this up on the show all the time, because it was a very important moment in my life. I read an I Tripoli spectrum articles saying Bluetooth is dead. In 2004. So it's just like, you know, just because things have a little bit of a lull or that doesn't mean they're not going to come back or they're still good technologies and all that.
So yeah, I beacons you were like the master of iBeacons you ran a crazy game during conferences. 
James: [00:05:44] Oh, my goodness. I did. Wow. Wow. Wow. Frank, that's all. Yeah, I totally forgot. I, uh, I created the evolve quest for Xamarin evolve, 20. 16, I guess at this 
Frank: [00:05:57] point, it's unforgettable. 
James: [00:05:59] Wow. I, we are good friends over at Estimote, which is, um, they have, they have a lot of cool new products.
I was just browsing their website, uh, including one with ultra wide band. I'll put you a link there, so you can browse that while I talk here. Uh, myself and Mike Blue's team actually did a session at Xamarin evolve on Bluetooth, low energy and iBeacons and we demoed. A few of them, including the estimates on stage and how you could, you know, at the point they were really for, Hey, is this thing nearby?
And am I close to it or not? And what was cool is we showed that in real time, on stage for iOS and Android, and then. Well, I did have the evolve quest, which was, there are these little God, my goodness. There was these little placards that we made and we hid them and you can, um, when you're in nearby them, you could, um, put them in the app and they would show a trivia question, and then you get a prize at the end.
And we even had a fallback, which was to scan a QR code. If your device didn't have Bluetooth, which was wow. We're so clever. Uh, it was really, really cool. And. And yeah, the are our good friends over at Estimote had given us a bunch of, um, Estimote, beacons, which are iBeacon and, um, which is the Apple thing.
And then Eddystone, which is the Google thing compatible with the API APIs. And they're really, really nice. They like it last for like ever basically like four to five year battery life. And it's really, really cool since then, uh, they came out with these other things which are ultra wide band for, um, indoor.
Uh, positioning and navigation, which is kind of like what we're talking about with these Apple air tags. And I've seen other products come out since then, too, which are mimicking these to navigate you around, uh, different facilities, but it looks like they make all sorts of stuff like workplace wearables and a bunch of others.
I think they pivoted into. Enterprise, definitely more. I think that that's where the use cases, like if you're in a, you know, an airport or you're in medical or you're in anything where you need to track things, moving around, let's say your ups, or I guess they have FedEx on here. So maybe I should say FedEx and you can track things around, but the concept was that it was a, you could stick one of these things.
And you could detect them anywhere and they even have little tiny tags that you could, you know, stick on, uh, your backpack or something. And what was cool is that Apple has a great API, um, that enables you to, uh, have your application automatically detect when one of the things that are nearby. So Apple has these in their stores.
I'm pretty sure this is how it works. It's like geolocation, but without. Uh, it's like geo geo, uh what's that G the other geo, the geo fencing. Thank you, Frank. Really awful today. It's like, geo-fencing, it's like geo-fencing, but you're inside of a mall. Remember a mall, like, imagine if you went into North gate and you're like, Oh, there's not an Apple store, but if there was.
Geolocation indoors is really hard. So that's why these proximities are so important. So it was cool is that you could walk into an Apple store inside of a mall and it wouldn't know you're nearby because these Bluetooth low energy, the future, if you will, is broadcasting these things and you can do all sorts of other things with them too.
I remember talking to. Somebody at sometime they were doing something with schools and just wanted to make sure like they could, they could kind of make sure that people where people were in the bus and this there's a bunch of different things. If I remember back in the day, um, or another one, I'm just going to keep on rambling off stuff.
This one was really cool. I remember talking to someone which was like, they were doing HVAC or something. And the whole concept is that they would. They would code these beacons with specific identifiers. And then when the technician would come up with the app, it would open the user guide for that specific one automatically they didn't have to scan anything or do anything.
So there's a lot of clever things. That could be done. However, air tags are completely different. Is that correct? 
Frank: [00:09:59] Right. I think, I think you just described like the whole industry, but that was well said, put that into a blog post. Uh, the battery life is kind of impressive. Isn't it? Like you were saying for years, the UWB site, which is Estimote ultra wide band chip, they're saying two years, Apple says one year on the air tag.
I don't know what the battery differences between the UWB and the. Air, uh, air tag, the air tag. The cool thing is it's that old standard batteries. So it's a nice cheap battery. Can you believe Apple with a battery? I just don't. I still can't get over it. You 
James: [00:10:35] can 
Frank: [00:10:36] replace. Yeah, I just, it boggles my mind. Um, the one big enabler, the unifier here, I think that you're S we're seeing these companies move a tiny bit away from Bluetooth, and that's where they're getting into these custom ultra ban chips.
And. I'm failing as an electrical engineer here. And what does ultra wide band actually mean? Other than, you know, it's probably a pretty big wide band, something like that. Um, but it's a separate chip and in the Apple world, it's called the U one chip and this was added to iPhones, iPhone 11 ish. I believe.
And there was basically absolutely no point for it because they hadn't released any air tags yet, but Apple did release an API called the nearby interaction API, and it was specifically written for iOS 14. So hot off the presses and only works with U one chips. So super hot off the presses only works with modern hardware.
So we are getting into this awkward transition where, what was so cool about Bluetooth? Four was everything was Bluetooth. Four. Anything could become a beacon, every device walking around in your mall, you called it a mall. I don't know. I don't know what that is, but whatever, walking around in that thing.
Uh, those would create like an ad hoc mesh network and they would blah-blah-blah to each other. And that's how you would try to triangulate your signal. These ultra wide bands are also doing that triangulation. They're just doing it a much, um, much higher level of accuracy. And that's, what's kind of fun about the air tag.
I just, when I got it, I was like, well, I'm not going to have like a thief steal my bag. So what am I going to do with this thing? So I came up with the fun game of shutting my eyes, throwing it up into the air, and then seeing if I could find it. So playing hide and seek with my air tag. This is what the COVID has brought.
Thank you, Rona. This is what brings joy to my heart, but it was super fun because Apple has within the find my app. Uh, the there's a new, your little chippy will show up if it's within any sort of range. I haven't figured out what the exact, like how far. A way it can be, because it'll try to talk to the internet.
You know, it uses some of the same technology we are doing for COVID tracking, uh, to do that kind of anonymous mesh, networking of positions and that kind of stuff. Really tricky code and all that to get. Right. But I kind of trust Apple on that side, but the neat thing is when you got within about 10 meters of the chip, it would switch to this high accuracy mode, which puts a big old arrow on your screen points in the right direction and tells you exactly how far you are from it.
And it's that level of hyper accuracy that I think is really cool in this new generation. 
James: [00:13:42] Yeah, I think that is a really neat, uh, I don't have a Yuan trip chip and my device because I am old school with my iPhone se two, uh, over here. However, uh, I'm pretty sure Heather has one, she's got an iPhone 11 pro, so that, that would probably qualify as it.
And I was, I was trying to think of other API equivalent because often a lot of times Apple devices or API sometimes have been, you know, Done a little bit. Uh, and, and they iterate on them and improve them. And I was, I was remembering so many Estimote, API APIs and SDKs. I try to do something similar. I remember Google had these nearby API APIs.
However, those are pretty different. They, they didn't do what this nearby interaction API. Does it similar, what they did was just enable you to pubsub to nearby devices if they were listening. In fact, one of my favorite apps that nobody uses it, but one of my favorite apps that does use it was pocket casts.
One of my favorite podcast apps is let's say you and I, because it was also cross-platform, which I'm BLE is you and I use pocket casts. Instead of you saying like, Hey, like here are all my favorite podcasts. You could just open your, open your iPhone and you could say, you know, share, share my podcast subscriptions with nearby, and then you would just see them on your device.
It was like, Hey, found James, his iPhone. It's kind of like, um, uh, when you share something, uh, with somebody and. Airdrop is like airdrop airdrop. It is airdrop. 
Frank: [00:15:20] You're really talking about on the Apple side is called multi peer connectivity. And this is an API that came out a long time ago, back in the back.
When the, I think Bluetooth fork came out, I think that's what kind of enabled it. And Apple made it really easy to create these very lightweight mesh networks where you could just find devices, join them to a network, share messages. Uh, two of them, multi peer connectivity. And the funny thing is the new API nearby interaction that still uses the device discovery mode of multi pure connectivity.
So they're building upon their own API APIs. So I'd say that's where the equivalency between the Android and iOS one is boy, you're just making me think. Dot net needs a unified model for nearby communications. We don't have an API for that really in dotnet. All you'd really want to do is expose some streams, streams and things, but that'd be a fun one to try to make a cross-platform.
But, um, the, the big problem, James is this nearby interaction API that I have been talking about. And then I'm excited about. It doesn't work with our takes. No. Interesting. 
James: [00:16:37] Wow. That seems like a bummer, but maybe our friends at St. Fusion can help out because they have everything that you to that transition was pretty good.
How Frank, I liked them. They have everything you need to make an absolutely delightful application, no matter what you're billing, whether it's a mobile app, a desktop app, a web application, whether using Xamarin react native you're using react or using angular or using asp.net you're using. WPF using UWP, they got to cover, they got beautiful charts, graphs, awesome controls, toggles, switches, custom lists, interviews every, I mean, they have everything really, to be honest with you, I use them in my Island tracker application on all sorts of different, different controls in widget to get a really beautiful, consistent user interface.
They have more than that though. They have really complex controls like PDF viewers and editors and photo editors. They also have word and Excel integrations. You can create Excel files or read Excel files, even have dashboards that you can integrate into your applications or wire it up to your data source and visualize your data for all of your Excel spreadsheet reports that you need to give to your manager.
Listen, if you're looking for something for your application, that will make it absolutely stunning. Check out our good friends at sync fusion. Uh, sync fusion.com/emerge conflict. The thanks to sync fusion for sponsoring this week's week. 
Frank: [00:17:55] Thank you. Think fusion. Oh, graphs are exactly what you need for this kind of stuff.
It's so hard to debug this stuff. You just graph, graph everything. Yes. Fusion graphs. Okay. 
James: [00:18:05] Put out, put out. But, so you're saying that you bought a device and you Frank can't even develop against said device. 
Frank: [00:18:14] The shame, the whore, I can't even hack this device, James. So you know me, I'm not going to look at the API first.
I want to see this thing, uh, talking over the network first. So I wanted to investigate all it's Bluetooth, goings ons. I've written Bluetooth scanning apps in the past. I actually have one that I, I wrote that I like to use myself and I brought the little air tag up because it is, I should say, although it is a U one chip and it's that ultra wide band, it still has a Bluetooth chip on it.
And I figured that's mostly for like discovery and configuration and updating the firmware who knows what Apple's doing with it. Well, I wanted to know that I was trying to find out what they were doing. And I discovered like Bluetooth that had four services published, but every time I would try to connect to one of these services, my app would crash like my, my Explorer app, you know, crash.
Great. Okay. So I guess I'm a terrible programmer. I'll go find another person's app. Try their app crashed. So I'm like, okay. I will try. Apple's Bluetooth app. Apple has. Um, if you go to your developer, downloads on Apple and look for additional X code tools, there are, there's like a cool clipboard viewer.
There's Bluetooth investigators, there's packets sniffers. There's just lots of little cool developer tools and a thing called the additional X code tools. And one of them is a Bluetooth sniffer. So I loaded that one up. Um, Okay. And which is fun. If you're on big Sur, all the permission models are so weird.
Make sure you go to your preferences. It's like Vista, it's the worst and make sure you go enable Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a thing. Now Bluetooth didn't used to be protected, but it's protected now. Yeah. So go and make sure that you give it permission. Got the Apple one to show the device. Every time I clicked on a service, it would lose its connection.
Hmm. So I don't know if this device is a hundred million percent obeying the Bluetooth standard. I don't know if it's just constantly power cycling itself, but so far I've had a very difficult time hacking it, you know, just trying to see the Bluetooth traffic myself. So that's when I started looking toward the API.
I'm going to catch my breath. 
James: [00:20:35] Yeah. I was going to say, because I mean, there are definitely Bluetooth services and devices in which you can't connect to it. Like they just not broadcast. Well, I guess if you're broadcasting and connect, but I guess the problem here is that somebody is connecting to it because you're right.
That's the thing is your iPhone can connect to it and detect things. So we have, why can't, you know, the only thing I could think of is that they. Sometimes I've seen this with the echelon indoor cycling bike. There is that little, um, you know, the little monitor, little display I created you remember that?
So here's a fun fact for you is that was off that project. I made for my, my bike and just made a generics order. Then any little $20 sensor that you could buy for measuring cadence of how fast you're pedaling, the Ashkelon bikes, which is a special type of bike, they have their own. Um, Bluetooth. And sometimes they have devices like a tablet that's installed or can connect from the app.
But I was looking at the guys code that made the original source code for the Arduino chip that we bought. And what he does is he connects to it and then to start reading the data, he has to send it very specific bites of data, it to accept. Um, the connection and then start sending stuff to, to the, to him, which is.
Uh, I mean, I guess it makes some sense, but, but that's where he was at. So is this similar or what's that, 
Frank: [00:22:11] I mean, I just got to talk about that for just a moment. It's hilarious because Bluetooth does have all these security layers. It's just, no one wants to implement them and they're not. Good. Yeah, they don't actually provide any real security.
They certainly don't provide any kind of API or communication security or anything like that. So what you found is these people create these ad hoc solutions, these ad hoc encryption system systems. The one wheel has this. It used to be super easy to trivially Bluetooth, connect to it and get, you know, all sorts of data from it.
But it doesn't do that anymore. Like you said, you have to connect to one service and the magical decryption key or whatever you want to call it. It's just, you know, a password that unlocks all the other stuff. And then the, all the other stuff works. No, this is totally different, but. Isn't that silly, like way to make a standard, that standard has like whole books on it.
Security model. And no one uses it because it's too yeah. Complicated. It's just train right, uh, standards. No, um, I don't know exactly what's going on here. It could be the chip power cycling, cause it is a ridiculously low power device, but I don't think it's quite fat. It could be that Apple at the driver level or at least at the user space level has a filter.
Um, Bluetooth traffic. And I've seen this before when trying to read other Apple devices and things. There's just some data that they filter out from the communications and that your application cannot access no matter what, unless you went down to like a kernel level and built a Colonel admin or something like that, you're just not going to get that data.
So in this case, what my next step, and I haven't done this, but the next step to take is you get an independent Bluetooth device. So I can either program my own, or you can, um, buy these little developer devices on Amazon that are just, you know, they don't care about your security and they're just going to do whatever they can and they'll, they can report all the traffic.
So I'd like to see how one of those more dedicated Bluetooth debugging tools. Would deal with it, but I haven't done that yet. It could be that it works under those conditions. Cause those, those tools by necessity are more robust. 
James: [00:24:26] Gotcha. Yeah. That makes some sense. 
Frank: [00:24:28] Hmm. Okay. So the real sad part is no API.
Yeah, except there is an API except this API doesn't work with our tags. Perfect. Right. So it's really hard to tell if we're in a situation where Apple's just a little off pace. Cause we, we know for a fact the air tags were not released when they wanted them to be released. They got pushed back for whatever reason.
And so it could just be that the API APIs on the device got a little misaligned at this happens all the time, or it could be, they're never going to let us access the air tags. And it's hard to tell. And my best reason for them not allowing us to access these air tags is because. That multiple-year conductivity that I was discussing before, the way that you discover other devices, it does have an authorization step to it.
You know, I can't just connect to your phone without you giving me permission. Uh, you need either my app or a dialog will appear something like that. There is a user permission model associated with it. My best guess why this multiple-year or sorry. Why the nearby interaction API is not currently working with the irritates is because there is not the associated security model.
These tags get paired to your phone once or whatever to your iCloud account once. And then it's yours. It's not meant to be read by anyone else. So it's, it's awkward because I have so many ideas for this little thing, but first I'd like to know how you feel about that. Little misalignment. How does that sound to you?
Does that sound like a schedule misalignment or a feature misalignment? Um, 
James: [00:26:11] I don't know. It, it feels as though it was, I it's gotta be a schedule. Just the issue. Like I just think that, yeah. You know, the other thing too is. I mean, listen, and a lot about the air tag stuff and potential litigation and things coming their way on it and could have been something they wanted to hold back on or, you know, Maybe they wanted to make, well, maybe they want to make tweaks to the API because the interesting thing about this one, right, is that, is that this API for nearby interactions was introduced in iOS 14.
Right. But obviously the, but it's supported on the iPhone 11, which shipped with iOS 13. So it's like they, they came out, they came out with this chip and did a thing, but didn't know how to use it yet. And then. I, I feel as though the API aligns though with the device, at least they're like thinking about it.
So my assumption here is like, they're like, Oh, we're going to make this API that we'll at least do something with this chip for developers. And then we're going to use it for our own magical, magical sauce. Cause they're using other API APIs. They're not using this API, 
Frank: [00:27:31] obviously. Right. They're probably both built upon a lower level API.
That's not exposed. I agree with you there. Yeah, totally. Yep. Uh, so what, what's your best guess? Do you think this is ever going to work for air tags or are they going to keep air tags private? 
James: [00:27:46] Uh, well, it depends on that litigation 
Frank: [00:27:50] or you really think so. Darn love courts. I 
James: [00:27:53] bet. I bet because I could imagine a world where if let's say the other tags out there use the official API APIs, then maybe they would have advanced, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And they could integrate into different systems because they're using official API APIs. But I would imagine that they. Probably keep this private for quite a long time, similar to the NFC. Right? They, they, they kept that NFC. This feels like an amnesty feature, like devices at NFC for awhile, but then like they integrated the NFC for Apple pale man.
Then three years later, like you can use NFC, it's a nuke new, crazy technology. Um, well I think that the use case for this is really weird though, because what they say for this, you know, session is that it. Is it, you have to maintain these. Connectivity. Right. And what they use them for now today is not with those air airtight, but what for phone to phone communication?
And this is when it, this is how it says it works best, which is why I don't think that this API is you use for air tags at all. Am I too in my popping along 
Frank: [00:29:00] too fast here? Uh, yeah, I think you must, if they're not used for communication, there are literally two values given back from this thing. Uh, there's an object called an N I nearby object.
And once you've, um, Uh, paired or whatever, and traded security tokens with another device. What you get from the two devices are distance and direction. And so their use case is like AR games. Like you're playing an AR game with your friend. That seems like the most contrived use case I've ever heard in my life.
I remember when phones first came out, we had that wonderful idea. And that's where that multiple-year connectivity came from. We thought we'd be doing more of these hyper-local games. It's just. It turns out people don't want to like toss around their phones in their hands. It's just, no, it's something we've learned not to do.
So these games haven't really taken off. Um, yeah, so it's not a communication thing, but Apple does have communication. That's multi-payer connectivity. This nearby integration is just distance and direction. Yeah. Because 
James: [00:30:06] here's what they say is they say. Um, nearby interaction is best used when the peer devices are within nine meters of each other.
So that's what 227 feet, 30 feet, something like that. I dunno. I dunno how to go with that. Let's do it in portrait orientation and they're each facing there. They facing each other with their back camera. So the back of the cameras are there. It says, it says. And I, that's what they're calling it detects nearby peer device when it appears within and I's line of sight as illustrated in the diagram below.
So it's two, I-phones looking at each other with their backs to each other. They're not talking to each other to anyway. So as the arrow in the center of the cone, they have cones coming out of the center, represents a direction vector, which extends outward. From the center of the phone, says the arrow can point anywhere within the cone and the direction.
However, the line of sight must be clear of obstacles that could interfere with the U one chips, communications, such as vehicles, 
Frank: [00:31:03] walls. That is probably the biggest downside of this. Um, Again, I don't know if the UN U one stands for ultra wide band. So we'll just stick with you. One here is they make it very clear that this is a very visual signal.
I need to be close by and it needs to be in some visual, uh, range, uh, unobstructed visual range. They do have one. I'm not going to call this a contrived experience, but it does sound vaguely nice. Um, a taxi or a ride share polling up. That would be a nice time to have this, um, really high accuracy stuff versus GPS where it's, it's harder to tell sometimes.
James: [00:31:46] Yeah, it'd be cool if you were in an Uber, right. And the Uber, they put up the phone and then they, then you put up your phone, you could like see an exchange, some data or something like that. And you could like, see. You know, you could, you could basically understand, like, is this actually the ride share thing that I'm looking for?
Um, yeah, I dunno, besides that, I'm, I'm really not impressed, like yeah. A game that enables a user to control a paddle with their device to and respond to a moving ball and the pier screen. No one's ever going to do that. No one has friends in the same room. 
Frank: [00:32:16] You don't want to throw your phone around in your hand, you just don't.
Yeah. I could 
James: [00:32:20] see like Snapchat using this for their first one where they're talking about like virtual balloons in the hands of the participant, you know, like where they're placing it and you're replacing the phone with something else. Um, but these are pretty. Minimal use cases for what I'm assuming is under the hood.
A very complex API. Oh yeah, 
Frank: [00:32:40] yeah. Uh, signal theory. It's just, it's it's good engineering to make this kind of stuff work. The principles are simple enough. It's one of those, the implementation it's what's is the hard part devil's in the details. Can I tell you the use case? I want sure. Hemi. It's outlandish, but, um, uh, the little Loomo robot that I have, it's, um, a segway with a little, uh, sensor on the top and it can self balance and it can follow me.
I love it a lot. It's a cute little robot problem is it's really not good at following me. They, they did their best, but it's like, you know, it's it's last generation technology camera wise. Um, Mathematics wise, you know, the algorithms that are running on it. It's last generation. Hasn't been updated to neuro networks, high fidelity cameras and all that stuff.
The net effect, James is it gets distracted by the sun and trees. Um, you know what? Seattle has a lot of. Trees, not sun every so often the sun does come out and, Oh my goodness, I cannot get this stupid thing to follow me because every time it sees a tree, it wants to go and say hi to the tree. And every time it sees the sun, it just freaks out and run straight into the road.
So this would, I would like to have a better follower mode and on my Twitch stream, I talk about this a lot. I want to build a better navigation system, but even better than visual and cameras and all that. Is this like a, this high precision tracking? This is absolutely perfect. I would love to be able to just have a little chip in my pocket and have the robot follow that chip.
That's just the perfect scenario for me, because then you won't, it won't matter if it's day or night. It won't matter if the sun is there. It won't matter if there's a tree that looks like a human is in front of it. It will just follow the signal of that chip with its exact, uh, uh, cryptographic key. So that just sounds perfect to me.
And I would like to get that kind of scenario working. That's why I'm so interested in this thing from the developer perspective, but Apple just. They always give you a little bit, but not everything that you want. 
James: [00:34:51] Yeah. There's a fun API that I hope they do open up in the future to do a lot more with these, you know, chips that are out there.
There'll be more phones. Um, I am intrigued though, like how they're doing well, I know how they're doing stuff, right. Because the, the thing is. With the air tag, they may be using this with the air tag when it's close enough, but they use that bigger mesh network to triangulate the position and report that back based on the what's, what it's like the, uh, what's that network that it's using.
The it's not , but it's like the global mesh, every single iPhone, you can detect any other iPhone in the entire world. 
Frank: [00:35:39] It's still just multi, pure connectivity. Like you said, it's just a, it's just a layer down the operating systems doing it all. It's just not presented to the user, but yeah, they they've been doing this kind of, um, mesh networking for precision location for a long time with the beacons, you know, and find they have a fine line.
Yeah. Yeah, they have a lot of experience with this. So it's exactly what you said. They're using that old good network proven it works well. You know, if you lose your phone, it's pretty easy to find your phone. Uh, assuming you can find another phone to find that phone and then just adding this high precision local part 
James: [00:36:17] to it.
Yeah, I do. I do believe that there is a lot of use cases like we were talking about for. Different pieces of hardware that could have this Yuan chip. I mean, that's the only problem with this API is do you want chip based? Whereas like beacons were generic. Right? But imagine all those use cases that I talked about earlier, but now they are using the  chip and you're getting super accurate, your readings and positions and all these certain things.
The position is the bigger thing in general, because with beacons and Bluetooth, you kind of have a idea of how close or how far away it is, but you don't know if the thing is. Moving or pivoting around or things like that. You could, you could build some really cool enterprisey, you know, applications. If you were able to buy little you one tags, that's what, that's what you'd want as little.
You want tags that cost $3, you know? Stick them on the 
Frank: [00:37:13] app. Apple is not releasing a three hour product. No, that's not going 
James: [00:37:17] to happen. That's what I'm saying. They would have to license a U one chip out to one of these beacon makers that does a thing, et cetera, et 
Frank: [00:37:24] cetera. Eventually there's going to have to be a standard, right?
Like we can't have Eskimo making UWB, Apple, making you one Samsung making us, I don't know what they would call it. We can't have that for too long. We can have that for three or four years, but eventually it shakes out to a standard. So it'd be interesting to see once it's standardized. How, how cheap can you make them for now, James?
$30 and only available on the Apple store 
James: [00:37:55] I'm in. Well, I still, probably not going to buy one. I've decided I'm not going to do it. And I'd. Maybe, I don't know. Whenever I lose something, once I lose something that's worth way more than the 30 days. And I'll probably pick it up. 
Frank: [00:38:10] Exactly. Um, yeah. Uh, again, I don't really have a proper use case for it.
My use case is pure fantasy based, but for now I'm just leaving it in my backpack. So. Who knows if my backpack it's going stolen, I can watch it float away into the ether. There you 
James: [00:38:29] go. Well, anything else you want to talk about about these APS? There is. 
Frank: [00:38:32] I want to wrap up too, but I do want to mention one thing because I did get the blank one because talking about money, Apple charges a lot for all the different covers for it that actually make it useful is.
Yeah, you can't actually attach anything to it. It's all round surfaces. It is the worst. So if you are incredibly gutsy, I fix, it has a video that shows you one or two spots where you can just drill a hole through 
James: [00:38:57] it. I saw that. Yeah. 
Frank: [00:38:59] I love it. I love it. I don't know if I will personally do that, but much better than that.
Um, on thing averse people have come up with good 3d models of it, and they've built all sorts of little devices to snap. And Sophie have a 3d printer. Make sure to go check out thing hers. It's it's getting to be pretty big. The selection 
James: [00:39:20] on there. That's nice. And if you ever want to find to print something for you, he tell you, well, he just will never deliver it to you.
It's been 
Frank: [00:39:27] printed for awhile. God, I feel so bad. Oh my God. 
James: [00:39:32] Preemie two things at this point. Is that correct? 
Frank: [00:39:36] And right behind me, James. Perfect. Yeah, one day, one day. Okay. I am going to be a better friend. That is my summer. Resolution. 
James: [00:39:47] You're already friends. You're a great friend. You're a great friend.
You're fine. You're fine. You know what I mean? 
Frank: [00:39:53] You're fine. Okay. That's okay. I get it to you one of these days. Perfect. That 
James: [00:39:56] sounds great. But so we'll see, I'm by episode 300, a Frank delivers on his promise. 
Frank: [00:40:03] That's like a year off, 
James: [00:40:04] right? Yeah. They're not paying you for these things. So really the timeline is.
As well, as on your, as on your scale, at this 
Frank: [00:40:11] point, you are invested though, you did buy product and I shipped it to me. So you do have some skin in the game. I did. I 
James: [00:40:19] did buy you some things that is correct. 
Frank: [00:40:21] Yeah, correct. Yeah. It'll be a return to, so to avoid the lawsuit, whatever. 
James: [00:40:27] All right. Well, thanks for tuning in.
Let us know what you think about your new fangled air tags or other. Tags that you have, or other really cool uses, maybe you're using the IB can still let us know or into the Shogun emergent conflict that FM there's a button on there that has contact, or you can opt in our discord and all those things.
Or you can reach out to us at Twitter at any time. So until next time there's been another merge conflict. I'm James Matsu Magno 
Frank: [00:40:50] and I'm Frank crooner. Thanks.