Lost something? XY Find It.
XY Find It is something I’ve been using for a few months now, but due to difficulty with my setup it’s been massively delayed on getting reviewed (it’s my rooted 15-bluetooth connection device I think, not the product’s fault).
The premise is pretty simple. XY Find It is a little BTLE device you attach to something you want to keep track of (for me it was keys,) and if you lose it your phone can tell you the last place it saw it.
Items can be marked as lost, which means when your phone gets near them and can sniff the Bluetooth heartbeat signal it can alert you as well as make the XY Find It beep. This is unfortunately next to useless in a loud bar other than to let you know you’re within 30 feet of so of whatever you lost.
You can track a whole lotta things, I don’t know that there’s an upper limit on how many devices the XY Find It will track, but the problem with a lot of these is the batteries do wear down eventually, and perhaps it’s just my setup but I got no alert the batteries were dying on my key beacon so when I finally lost them and opened the app I was looking at a notice that said my keys were last seen at work three weeks ago.
Hrmm… not particularly the greatest in terms of keeping up with what I needed. Judging by other people’s reviews, I may have either had a bum battery or just tested it to death.
Another good feature of the XY Find It is that each beacon has a button you can press which will alert your phone. If you’ve lost your phone but have your keys, bam, you should be set.
I love the concept, and I got it working properly when I deleted every other Bluetooth device, uninstalled the Xposed Framework, killed off Greenify, and ran as a normal user. Unfortunately one of those three things appeared to render the app next to unusable and I never figured it out. I evidently was the only one as my contact couldn’t get a fix. Ah well, I’m a special rooted snowflake, I understand.
But wait, there’s more
XY Find It works with iOS and Android. It also works with people you don’t know. Let’s say you leave your keys in a cab and they end up going home with another passenger by accident. As that passenger is getting out of the car someone else with the XY Find It app on their phone walks by and “hears” that beacon on your keys.
Their app shoots a notification to the central servers that “hey, I just passed beacon 9238479823487 at this at this approximate location.” As you’re the registered owner of beacon I’m too lazy to cut and paste that random number I hammered out, you get to see where the community reported it.
Great for lost keys, sort of creepy should you start placing these in people’s cars to see if random unsuspecting XY Find It app users randomly pass by and upload GPS data.
But that’s not all
Totally didn’t test this part out, but you can assign the button on the beacon to do things within the app. Think using the beacon in your car and then when you press the button your phone orders you a pizza. I’m a little not serious here, but with how you can configure it to do anything, I’m just throwing out ideas.
You could make it order me a pizza… that would be cool.
It can also alert you when something is out of your range such as keys or an unrestrained mini human.
Uses
- Find keys
- Figure out where you left your car
- Know when your kid gets too far away
- Creepily track people in metro areas
- Find stuff you lost based on slacktive reporting of other users
- Find your phone or do something with the press of a button
There are three generations of the XY Find It series at the moment. I’m believing I used Gen 3, however it’s been a while and I’ve been a horrible reviewer. They look the same, and the app is the same. The best price I see is a three pack that comes in at a little under $12 a device on Amazon for the XY2. They’re between $15 and $25 for the XY3 on the XYFindit site.
