fair questions.

your own airtag, your dashcam, a neighbor's camera: open the detection, tap it in the logbook or on the map, and hit ignore. it goes quiet right away, no map pins, no log spam, no buzzer. the ignore list lives on the beacon itself, so it holds even when your phone isn't around; you teach it your own gear once. select mode in the logbook clears a few at once. ignored devices sit on the device screen, tap to un-ignore. the list holds up to 256 devices.

yes, and it's the mirror image of ignore. open any detection and hit watch (the star). that device becomes its own category, watched device, your own custom category: the beacon calls it out every single time it's near, even with no known signature, even in a crowd of other signals, and even if it would otherwise be ignored. rename it in settings so the log reads like your log ("landlord's camera", "that van"). the watchlist lives on the beacon itself, so it holds when your phone is away, and it survives reboots; it holds up to 256 devices. tap the star again to stop watching. one honest caveat: watching matches the exact hardware address. phones change theirs every few minutes, and a separated tracker changes its own about once a day, so the app warns you when a star probably won't stick.

on purpose, and it's the beacon working right. an airtag that's close to its owner's iphone or other apple gear broadcasts a quiet "still with my owner" signal, and the beacon deliberately holds fire on those, otherwise it would scream about your own phone, earbuds, watch and tags all day long. a tag only switches to the louder "separated from owner" broadcast about fifteen minutes after it loses touch with every one of its owner's apple devices, and that separated tag is exactly the one worth knowing about: one that's been slipped into your bag or car. so a silent airtag sitting next to you is the beacon being right, not missing it. want to see it fire? leave a tag away from all of your apple devices for fifteen-plus minutes, then walk it past the beacon. tile and samsung tags don't have the same "with owner" hush, so those can show sooner.

because a tracker you walk past isn't the thing to worry about; one that travels with you is. the beacon logs a separated tag from the moment it hears it, and holds the buzzer for the first minute so a tag you drift past in a parking lot stays quiet. what it does not do is decide for you that a tag is following you. that call needs your location over time, and the beacon has no GPS, so it belongs in the app. the app doesn't make it automatically yet. what you get today is the raw material: every sighting, with when and where, so you can see for yourself whether the same tag keeps turning up in places you've been. one honest limit either way: a separated airtag changes its identity around 4am, so a tag that rides with you overnight looks like a brand new tag in the morning.

a phone app is stuck behind the phone: one shared radio, throttled in the background, and blind the moment the screen locks or you close the app. the beacon carries two radios, one for WiFi and a dedicated bluetooth scanner, so it watches both at the same time, all the time: bluetooth never stops listening while WiFi hops channels or while the beacon talks to your phone, whether your phone is in your pocket or across the room. it keeps its own log when the phone's away and buzzes on its own. the app is the screen; the beacon is the thing actually watching.

the beacon is a passive receiver. its detection side transmits nothing and intercepts nothing, it just listens to radio signals that devices broadcast publicly, the same ones your phone hears all day. the radios inside are FCC-certified modules, and the detection side is receive-only, the only thing it ever transmits is the bluetooth link to your own phone. that said, laws vary by country and state, so check yours before carrying one.

no. no account, no cloud, no fees, no telemetry. buy the beacon once, use the free app forever.

nowhere. detections are logged on the beacon and mirrored to the app over a direct connection. nothing touches a server, and there is no server to touch.

so a hit becomes a place on a map, not just a beep. that's the whole point, seeing where it is. your location is used on your device only, to pin detections and center the map; it is never transmitted, and there is no server for it to go to. during a drive session it can keep tagging in the background, same rule, on-device only. say no and the app still works, you just lose the pins. don't trust me, read the code.

it hears anything that emits WiFi or BLE signatures: flock and other ALPR cameras (including flock's raven audio units), drones broadcasting remote ID (not just DJI, also parrot, skydio, autel and yuneec), body cams, recording glasses like ray-ban / oakley meta, snap spectacles and vuzix, airtags and similar trackers, and, if you switch it on, wifi ip cameras from known surveillance brands like hikvision, dahua and reolink that are broadcasting on a nearby network. motorola solutions gear surfaces under body cams, a broad match, so it rides with the body-cam toggle and switches off there. it cannot see wired or fully passive cameras that emit no radio. and not every ALPR camera is catchable, either: some, like ubicquia, backhaul over a dedicated cellular network instead of WiFi or bluetooth, so they never announce themselves on the bands the beacon listens to. the full story, limits included: how it detects.

sometimes, and the honest limits matter here. switch on the network-cameras option and the beacon flags wifi ip cameras from known surveillance brands, hikvision, dahua, amcrest, axis, reolink, that are powered on and broadcasting on a network nearby, even a network you have not joined. that catches a real slice of them. but it cannot find a camera that does doesn't announce itself on a radio it can read: anything wired or analog recording to an sd card, a camera on a cellular sim, one that is powered off or motion-idle, or a no-name cam whose chip it cannot tell apart from a smart plug. it does no lens or infrared detection. so an empty scan does not mean the room is clean. use the beacon alongside a real physical sweep: check smoke detectors, vents and mirrors, sweep a flashlight for lens glints, and look for tiny infrared leds through your phone camera in the dark.

no, the two answer different questions. those hollow rings are the known-ALPR layer you can switch on: community-mapped ALPR locations from openstreetmap, the registry the deflock project maintains. the solid pins are live detections, cameras the beacon is hearing right now. a ring with no pin on it is a camera someone mapped that isn't putting out anything the beacon can catch: plenty of ALPRs backhaul over their own cellular link and never announce themselves on WiFi or bluetooth, so they sit on the map but stay silent on the air. the beacon can't hear what never transmits. it cuts the other way too, a live pin with no ring is gear that's new, moved, or on nobody's map yet. use them together: the map shows what's known to be there, the beacon confirms what's actually talking. if something is broadcasting and the beacon still missed it, that's a signature gap, send me the log.

normally the beacon only calls out surveillance gear it recognizes. desert mode flips that: it reports every device broadcasting nearby, phones, watches, earbuds, TVs, not just the surveillance categories. it exists for three things: proof of life (flip it on for a few seconds and your own phone and earbuds show up, so you know the beacon is hearing the air), sparse areas where little is around to detect, and capturing an unknown device so you can send me the raw log to build a new signature. it is off by default and meant to be temporary, a busy street turns it into a firehose, so switch it back off when you're done.

it keeps logging, far more than a normal session will hit. desert mode reports every device around you, not just surveillance gear, so a busy block is a firehose: every phone, watch, earbud and TV in range. the app holds a large rolling window of recent detections, with a ceiling just high enough that your phone stays fast in a marathon session. it's a window that moves with you, not a bucket that fills up and freezes. the offline black box is a different tool: it records while your phone is away, not alongside it, so it won't backfill a marathon session you watched live.

yes, that's the offline buffer: turn it on once and the beacon keeps logging detections while your phone is away, encrypted on the beacon and replayed when you reconnect; back in the app, the log's all / new / offline filter pulls up just those buffered hits. one honest limit is location: the pocket beacon has no GPS of its own, so offline hits are pinned to the last position your phone shared before it left. that's accurate while the beacon stays put, so the offline buffer is built for a stationary, deploy-and-leave spot with no phone nearby. carry it around with no phone and those pins stay at the last known location.

the slim beacon ($100) is open for preorder on tindie now; the battery version ($145) comes later. both are intro prices for the first batch: a small first run costs more per unit to build, so the price goes up once that batch is out. the current shipping estimate lives on the tindie listing, and you can cancel any preorder for a full refund any time before it ships. star the github repo to get build news first.

the beacon, assembled, flashed, and bench-tested. the slim model runs on any USB-C cable and power source you already have, a power bank, a wall charger, your car. shipping and handling is a flat $7, added at checkout on tindie.

any phone with bluetooth LE running iOS 18 or newer, or android 8 or newer. the app is free on both, no account needed.

the beacon keeps working. there's no account, no cloud, and no server it depends on, detection runs entirely between the device and your phone. the app and firmware source stay on github, forkable forever. the only thing that would stop is new signature updates from me.

yes, and for free. detection is signature-based, and new surveillance hardware keeps appearing, so the signatures keep coming. when new firmware lands, the app flags it and you install it over-the-air over bluetooth, or flash it through the web flasher in your browser over USB. the app and firmware are open source, so you can see exactly what changed. one purchase; it keeps learning.

the app and the firmware are fully open source, and always will be. the board design itself is not published. you buy the hardware, you own every byte it produces.