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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

You can buy third party "Find My" compatible tags for about $5 from Temu or Aliexpress. Although they're about the same size as regular Airtags, they're:

- easier to take apart (if you want discard the casing), and

- cheaper

I took one of the ones I have out of its casing to see what could be made thinner, and I found that most of the thickness was due to:

- The batter holder (CR2032)

- The speaker

- The button

The speaker and button could probably be dispensed with after initial setup. The battery holder could be removed, and the power supplied from the side instead of the top (if you want a thin card-like form factor).

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Guessing those are missing ultra wide band?

Seems doubtful to me that someone implemented all three frequencies at 5 bucks

How much do you think a $20 AirTag costs to actually manufacture?

I don't know how much it costs to manufacture, but nobody is selling a UWB tag for $5. For $5, you only get BLE.

I certainly can't claim to have ordered and received one, but there are absolutely $5 UWB devices for sale on AliExpress, and that's before any bulk discount.

If Apple sells them for $20 it's highly likely some random Chinese seller can make money at $5.

Can you link me to one? I haven't found any of those.

I'm looking for a source of like ~100 UWB-only ones aiming for about 2~3 weeks of battery runtime on a pack of 2~3 AA batteries. Mostly depends on what voltage end the chips handle better: 2V low end, or 4.5V high end.

The aim is to keep track of where shared equipment is during the logistics phases of 39c3.

And, also, using the quite possibly wall-wart-piwered base station network to provide what's essentially rather precise indoor-GPS to users with sufficiently open FiRa hardware.

The problem is they don’t have accurate positioning via UWB, so you only get a map pin and a beep, not an arrow and an exact distance.

The $5 tags are comparable to tile or google tags, but miss the key feature of airtags.

I was wondering what you were talking about, as I have never seen the arrow when trying to locate a genuine AirTag that's misplaced within our house.

But that's because neither of the devices I've used to locate things (a recent iPad and an iPhone X) have the UWB hardware.

Another thought: these $5 tags still seem as good or better than a DIY tag using the current version of OpenHaystack, right? Unless OpenHaystack supports UWB?

I have seen modified AirTags on Etsy that enable the uwb to work

Have almost pulled the trigger and bought one multiple times but I keep just losing my wallet instead

Source: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1318724878/modified-3-mm-sli...

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