How the Totem Compass Works | Hacker News Reader

How the Totem Compass Works

totemlabs.com

83 pointstoomuchtodo52 comments

The title doesn't lie. I've scrolled about a kilometer and I've learned everything from GNSS, mesh networks, how to pair units and privacy implications.

But I have absolutely no idea what is is.

What does it do? Why would anyone want one?

So it seems it has a vibe mode and a compass mode. You can pair with four other totems and if you tilt it up you can find them. How? I don't know but supposedly the arrow get's brighter when you point it in the right direction maybe?

Vibe mode blinks with the music.

Strangely, I found the image at the beginning to be very informative: (https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/65e4ed3b65febd941c403512/...)

Each person's device shows the bearing to each other person's device, based on color. You can find other people with linked devices, and the UI looks dead simple after pairing is complete.

I had that same issue. (To be fair, this is a deep link to the page explaining how it works, not what it is.)

Anyway, the main page explains it: https://www.totemlabs.com/

Basically you and several friends get these devices, go to a festival or event together, and it helps you find physically find each other. The display indicates which direction they are relative to you.

This means you don't have to play the "let's meet back here in 90 minutes" game.

Obviously you can just use a cell phone, but that only works if there's good coverage.

In large events (100k+ people within a square km or so) cell phone networks often get saturated to the point of not working anymore. You can have 5 bars but not be able to download anything because the cell site is overloaded.

Theme park + teens seems like a use case.

I read the article and it beautifully explained that it is a tool for people at public gatherings like festivals to easily be able to find each other. And to be able to alert friends to find one of one would feel uneasy in a situation.

The direction of your paired friends is indicated by the max. Four lights at the outer ring. The compass tracks the direction you are going towards and this way, by aligning the "needle" with the target light it leads you to your friend.

Go to the homepage. https://www.totemlabs.com/ The OP article looks much more like something to read if you know what it is, and want to know how the engineering team pulled it off.

They're for keeping track of and finding friends at events like raves or big concerts. I don't know if this one does, but others have an "I'm in distress" feature that alerts all their friends as well.

Disclaimer: I've never used one. Well, honestly, I've never been to a rave or huge concert, so I'm not the target audience.

Yeah, they've got an SOS button on the back that'll (silently) make your friends' devices blink to say "come find me." Not sure how noticeable it would be on the dance floor without a noise or vibrate, though.

So how did they solve the "horrible people exist and will use this to stalk and murder their victims" problem?

Normalizing these types of things is not great, imo, and I'm not sure even Apple has pulled it off yet, with their airtags. Any tech that is tracking and surveilling you can be used to track and surveil you, and any company that doesn't explicitly say "we will not harvest, monetize, abuse, or otherwise misuse your data" will harvest and sell your data, using "industry standard" anonymization or other techniques to sell a false sense of security. Any bits of data you give away are bad, but gps style realtime location tracking is dangerous as hell.

Phones are bad enough - not sure I appreciate the niche this is filling, or why "even more robust" tracking that works when phones don't is a positive.

Plan ahead, use walkie talkies with your buddies if there's no phone service, or so on, the potential for harm from this tech seems to heavily outweigh any ephemeral convenience.

> So how did they solve the "horrible people exist and will use this to stalk and murder their victims" problem?

My making you pair them with your friends.

> not sure I appreciate the niche this is filling, or why "even more robust" tracking that works when phones don't is a positive.

You've never tried tracking friends with phones in a super-crowded place where the cell network is falling over, like a baseball game or concert venue.

> Plan ahead, use walkie talkies with your buddies

That's a great idea! Plan ahead and use a radio-based device to find and navigate to where your friends are.

You know. Like the one in this article.

Addressed in the linked article:

> Can the Totem Compass allow someone to follow me home?

> The Totem Compass is designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to follow you home after the event. Because the Unity Mesh Network™ relies on other compasses to communicate, when the festival disbands, the mesh network disappears. At that point, the max range reverts to the peer-to-peer range of 500-1000 meters.

> Once you get in your car or rideshare vehicle at the end of the night, you will quickly get out of range of anyone else who bonded with your compass. This means that the only way someone could track you after the festival is if you keep your compass on, and if they stay within 500-1000 meters of you during your entire trip.

Why the thing doesn't just have an off switch...

It does have an off switch. Repeating from the above for emphasis:

  This means that the only way someone could track you after the festival is if you **keep your compass on**

Also implied in the instructions when you arrive at the festival:

  Turn on your Totem Compass

When I saw the headline I was really ready to make fun of it and say it sounds like more of a Burning Man art project than a viable product, but after reading the linked article, it seems like they really put much more thought into this than I was inclined to give this sort of device credit for.

It looks like it lets you send very low-information signals that allows you to ping, check status for, and navigate to other device-holders you are paired with.

It seems interesting, but I think it could use smartphone pairing and chat capabilities to actually get off the ground.

Also, for a device intended for festivals, fall is a poor release date. Most of the year's festivals will be concluded.

Step 2 is: you go where we say.

Oh great! Someone (Garmin?) used to have a fully off grid group locator like this, but they stopped selling it pretty quickly. This kind of thing is very useful when cell coverage is poor (i.e. put one on your dogs collar). There are times when you can't rely on the cell network and, for those cases, these kinds of devices are super useful. I don't really care for the "party" features but if I can buy 4 of them and each one can display how to get to the other device, it would be amazing!

That’s actually a great idea. Especially as one is already cheaper than those yearly subscriptions for a dog tracker (at least in Germany). Sadly they are a bit too big to put on our one cat that always roams a bit far. ;-)

The radio has a range of max 1km. If there are no other devices in range to extend your reach by mesh routing, you will quickly lose track of your pet... Maybe with a lower band radio and/or a Lora-like transmission technique these could have been made with a higher range but 1km seems ok for a festival setting

There are use cases where 1km is too short (and Garmen does make dedicated, multi-gps trackers for hunting with dogs), but for many run of the mill use cases (i.e. losing your dog on a hike) it seems great.

Is this effectively "Find My", but as a special purpose device?

Yes. With a lot of interesting tech, that - as per the article - allows for a better reach and experience (and stability of the situation). Not sure about their claims, though.

But a cool writeup nonetheless imho.

Looks interesting from the tech perspective. I was nearly going to buy two for my kids. We don’t go to festivals but now and then on larger events and a fun toy.

But looking at the size I am a bit hesitant. Airtag does the job and soon they will have a cellphone…

It's cool tech and there seems like lots of opportunities: tracking kids, event security (tie the device to the 'ticket'), disaster emergency (how many people in this area).

They don't talk about battery life. Isn't the Airtag an RFID reactive (no battery) device? A big difference.

AirTags have batteries. They are good for about a year. Unfortunately they still depend on iPhones/iPads to detect and report location over any meaningful distance - this device is intended for use in large, outdoor areas (to minimize location inaccuracy) like music festivals or big outdoor sporting events.

This device claims 24-36 hours per charge. Actual specs are on the "preorder now" page. Claims 35g weight and dimensions of 50 mm diameter and 15 mm thickness.

I could definitely see families buying these before a theme park trip. Compared to the total cost of a Disney trip for four or five, $200 (4 @ $50) or $235 (5 @ $47) is a drop in the bucket.

I am still trying to understand what it has ontop of fun tech:

- small kids would find their way back in their own compared to a airtag as they have am arrow. But then you don’t really have a map to understand where they are.

- bigger kids have cell phones with locations sharing and sms/whatsapp I don’t see the need.

As much as I try to find a reason to buy I can’t for family usecases (except as a toy for fun) and on occasion where the towers are overloaded.

Overloaded towers and a desire for silent SOS.

It's been a long time since I have been subjected to Disneyworld, but the Verizon service there ~ten years ago was awful.

I don't think of this so much as a way for kids to find mom and dad as a way for mom and dad to find the kids. Since it's designed to be operable by people who are high as hell, it's necessarily simple.

This is quite cool. Being with a couple of friend in a large gathering this is probably useful to find eachother as it gives you the direction to where they are. I’d try this if I ever found myself in this predicament.

When I initially watched the demo video, I was wondering how the devices might locate each other. I thought it was using ultra wide band (UWB) like iPhones but now I see it’s just GPS. I’m not sure how many of these events are indoors vs outdoors, but it definitely won’t work indoors. Wonder how they might try to make it work indoors if there’s no additional hardware onboard.

A device can't locate other devices via GPS (GNSS apparently, which includes GPS and other systems); it can only locate itself. GNSS is only a receiver; there's no way to transmit unless you have a satellite. [0]

Having located itself, the device has to transmit its location to other Totem Compasses via other means. It says it uses 2.4 GHz spectrum and some stripped down, low-latency protocol (why does low-latency matter here?).

[0] I can setup a local cellular transmitter; has anyone tried setting up a GPS transmitter and hack it to send other useful information besides PNT? Yes, I know you can send misleading PNT info; I'm talking about doing something useful.

Interesting, it seem the GPS is is used for getting location of totems and it then shares the location with other linked totems via Mesh. Then a simple calculation is used for getting initial bearing and as you rotate the totem (which I’m sure has a magnetometer)the lights brighten as you get closer to the bearing! Nice!

So, each gadget broadcasts its unique ID and current coordinates into the mesh. Is that in plaintext? What prevents someone from collecting all that data? What prevents someone from following arbitrary people who haven't "bonded" with them?

I read the first few pages and couldn't figure out what it actually does. All it talks about is how it "works" without saying what "works" means to the users of the device. Very frustrating.

No affiliation, stumbled upon it and thought it was a cool mashup of GNSS, mesh networking, and the presentation layer/UX. I hope you find reading about it as enjoyable as I did.

I wonder if they intend to measure pressure and display altitude difference (or at least its sign) at some point. (That could be very helpful when skiing.)

"a new era for festivals and live events ... designed to give people freedom. Freedom to roam, freedom to dance. Freedom from fear & uncertainty."

Fear and uncertainty at a festival? Aren't they supposed to be fun? I humbly suggest someone in fear at a festival should be at a therapy session tackling their agoraphobia or anxiety instead of playing with a glow in the dark p2p gps? Maybe festivals have changed since I last went to one, and I don't even like them.

I've routinely gotten lost from my friends at festivals, and while I wasn't scared, I would have liked being able to find them again.

I suppose for young girls the feeling of unsafety might be bigger than it ever was for me, as a boy.

Edit: there's also the anxiety on the other side. What if you lose track of your younger sibling/drunk friend/child? It would be nice to be able to find them again without freaking out.

Sounds cool, but every time I tried something "mesh", it was very-very slow and buggy.

In this particular case, each device must act as a cell tower, but even advanced cell towers have connection capacity, how is it solved here? Also, cell towers have unlimited battery.

I'm more concerned that I would end up being the only one with a compass.

Got a Meshtastic radio, set it up in Omaha, Nebraska ... crickets.

I don't want to buy, but I really like this as a rental device.

pretty cool, seems to be purpose built for festival enviroments; there's an SOS feature too. hope it works well... mesh networks can be tricky and kind of slow.

Back in my day... never mind.

Good ol' pissing on the side of the tree. Lasts longer than any battery and also wards potential predators off. Dog approves. Spice up that smell with a caramel macchiato add-on if you're into startups.

See also Meshtastic for greater capabilities but same off grid approach. Additionally, if this isn’t a LoRa radio underneath I’ll be stunned.

Totally agree on Meshtastic being an superset of this product's features.

Although LoRA radios come in 2.4 Ghz variants which makes sense for a global product launch vs. needing to have multiple SKUs for each region, I'm leaning towards Totem Lab optimizing BOM cost and taking a simpler route with just an ESP32.

ESP-NOW mesh protocol [1] seems to be around the 1000m range statements that are mention in their mesh blog post [2].

> The Unity Mesh Network™ is layered on top of a peer-to-peer connectionless communication protocol. This peer-to-peer protocol allows any two Totem Compasses to track each other at a range of up to 1000 meters.

[1] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/... [2] https://www.totemlabs.com/post/unity-mesh-network

That’s a good point. I could also see them using NRF24s

...but how do I keep these people away from me? Is there another device, or can I just chuck stones at their stupid happy faces should they come into throwing range?

Like other posters, I read the whole thing and couldn't think of a reason for this device. I have experienced the many people cell issue but I am old enough to remember a time before cell phones at concerts.

This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.

> This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem.

My friends and I independently came up with this exact idea at the most recent regional burn event, specifically to better coordinate meeting back up after wandering, and then discovered this device, so it's very much a real problem in need of solving.

Concerts are usually pretty easy to find your friends after splitting up. They are usually at the bar, restrooms, or a handful of viewing spots or seats. Big raves, music festies, burns, and other large gatherings are spread over a much wider area.

I get what you're saying, however, after attending Austin City limits Music Festival, where at any given time there can he 70K or more people in attendance, trying to find my wife, who was watching a different band at a different stage then me, can be a struggle to meet back up. (Especially after the band is finished and people start shuffling to the next stage for another band.)

It's also very confusing for a person who isn't very direction savvy. For this reason alone, I'm definitely going to look into these compasses.

Think of it as "Find My" but without having to rely on random people's iPhones to detect your tracker. There are pros & cons to each. In general, I think it boils down to this:

1. Find My networks are great when you're trying to find a thing 2. Totem-style GPS-based devices are great when you're trying to find a person who might be able to react to a ping

The problem I think Totem has is that the use case is pretty limited and the cost per unit is probably pretty high. It's basically the inverse product of Yondr[1], which also has a pretty high cost for what it does. As a parent of three, and also as a dad who regularly travels with tween/teen soccer teams, have an easy way to interactively track kids would be very helpful sometimes. I see Totem as a highly feature-reduced Garmin InReach but with a much more intuitive UX for the singular use case it serves.

[1] https://www.overyondr.com/phone-free-schools

That is a fair point. I forgot about kids. That could be a nightmare trying to find your tween at a big festival.

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