I want to be able to quickly check the location of my dog -- which room of the house or part of the yard that she's in.
I have a GPS collar for her, but I've decided not to use GPS because of
- the expensive of paying for a data plan and
- the significant lack of precision, particularly indoors
On the hardware side I can think of several obvious solutions:
- Bluetooth
- RFID
- WiFi
- Any of the above technologies being used as a dongle for her collar either
- independently based on proximity from a computer or router
- or (more likely) in combination with beacons in each room + my router
However I don't know of a software solution to manage the hardware in this way.
Ideally I would like to interface with it through my Echo (Amazon's voice-controlled home automation hub) so that it would be like on Star Trek where I go "Computer, locate Lt. Puppy" and Echo will be like "Lt. Puppy is in the Holodeck".
I believe that I could write the app (the "skill" in Amazon-speak) to integrate the app with Echo though, if such an app exists.
It seems like there are a lot of apps that do this for larger scale -- for instance, I already have TrackR but they don't work within the home.
I am open to Windows, Linux, mobile or web-app solutions. Basically anything except MacOS.
Update: I found this related Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_positioning_system ... come to think of it, I used to work for an evil location-based advertising company called Jiwire that talked about determining your exact location within a store (e.g. which aisle of a grocery store you're in) based on your mobile data and using that to display related ads on your phone...
