fair questions.

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 (the meta vendor ID is now field-confirmed off a capture of three worn pairs, though it only fired twice in 70 minutes, so missing a pair is the likely outcome; snap and vuzix ship on but aren't confirmed, and the app marks every glasses hit as a lead to verify), airtags and similar trackers, and, if you switch it on, wifi cameras from brands whose hardware addresses it knows, hikvision, dahua and reolink alongside consumer names like ring, wyze and eufy, that are broadcasting on a nearby network. motorola solutions gear surfaces under body cams as a separate broad match on its own switch, and it ships off: every one of those hits in our own capture turned out to be fixed equipment, not anything worn. 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. that boundary also moves: through early august our own drives caught flock's falcon cameras over wifi, always the same way, a camera scanning for a network to join. across four sites that stopped between august 3 and august 8, including one parking lot where the same three units were detectable on the 3rd and silent on the 8th while the board heard 3,927 other devices around it. the label on one of those units explains it: a verizon cellular modem for backhaul, with wifi only there for setup and servicing, so a unit that is already online has no reason to transmit at all. bluetooth still catches them, and did twice on that same drive. we would rather tell you a channel went quiet than let you work it out from an empty screen. two more limits worth stating plainly, because they decide what an empty screen means. first, the wifi radio is 2.4 GHz only: there is no 5 GHz receiver in it, so a camera that lives on the 5 GHz half of a network is invisible to it, and more new gear is going 5 GHz first. second, it listens to one wifi channel at a time, favouring channel 6 (about half the listening time) because that is where most gear sits, and spreading the rest across the other twelve at roughly 4% each, so something beaconing on channel 11 as you drive past can genuinely be missed. on the dual-radio board bluetooth does not have this problem at all: it gets its own dedicated radio and listens continuously. the full story, limits included: how it detects.

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. and it's measured, not just claimed: on one test drive the same hardware running two radios logged about two and a half times the unique bluetooth devices a single radio caught (9,795 vs 3,840, more than 7,000 of them the single radio never saw at all), and when both caught the same device the two-radio unit saw it first about nine times in ten. a phone is that single-radio case, only throttled harder in the background. the app is the screen; the beacon is the thing actually watching.

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 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.

the slim beacon is $100 for the first production run of 32 hand-built units, then $119 as the standard price. the battery version ($145) comes later, priced closer to launch. the intro price is real, not a countdown-timer trick: a small first run costs more per unit to build, so it goes up once these first 32 are 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, you can even plug it into your phone. shipping and handling is a flat $10, added at checkout on tindie.

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 unignore. 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. to star something the beacon does not already recognize, switch desert mode on so it shows up at all, star it, then switch desert mode back off: the star keeps working either way. rename it in settings so the log reads like your log ("landlord's camera", "that van", etc). 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.

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.

nine times out of ten it's the cable, not the beacon. the USB-C port sits recessed behind the case wall, so a plug can feel seated while it's still a hair short of full contact. that gives it power in stutters: the board boots, browns out, and boots again, which is the loop you're hearing. push the connector straight in until it stops, firmly. it should bottom out with a definite seat, not a soft stop. a few other things cause the same symptom: a chunky overmoulded plug that hits the case before the connector seats (a slimmer cable end fixes it), a tired or damaged cable with a marginal power line (swap cables before you suspect the board), and a power bank that is nearly flat or cuts out on its own (plug into a wall charger to rule the bank out). if it still cycles on a known-good cable in a wall charger, that isn't a cable problem, so email me and i'll sort it out.

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.

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.

sometimes, and the honest limits matter here. switch on the network cameras option and the beacon flags wifi cameras from vendors whose hardware addresses it knows: hikvision, dahua, amcrest, axis and reolink on the professional side, plus ring, wyze and anker/eufy on the consumer side, when they are powered on and transmitting on a network nearby, even a network you have not joined. a hit names the vendor, not the device: it can just as easily be a doorbell, a recorder, or a camera the host disclosed, and an anker/eufy hit may not be a camera at all, since that registration covers their whole catalogue. how much this catches is not something i can put a number on. but it cannot find a camera that 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.

not far, and that is physics, not a setting. bluetooth LE and 2.4 GHz wifi are short-range by design, so the beacon only hears what is genuinely near you: very roughly tens of meters, stretching toward 100 m outdoors with clear line of sight to something pole-mounted, and dropping to a few meters through walls, car bodies, or a bag. wifi usually carries a little further than BLE, and a camera with a real antenna on a pole beats a body cam under a jacket. where the beacon sits matters too: on the dash it hears much more than buried in a backpack. treat it as "what is around me right now," not a neighborhood scanner. something a block away behind buildings will usually not register at all, which is the other half of why an empty screen means nothing announced itself in range, not that nothing is there.

roughly 4 to 7 hours of continuous scanning on a charge, depending on how much is around to detect - about 4 hours in a device-dense crowd, up to ~7 somewhere quiet. two radios listening nonstop is a power-hungry job, so the battery model is a "few hours in your pocket" device, not an all-day one, and i'd rather tell you that up front. a battery-saver eco mode in the app stretches it further by easing off the wifi sweeps while bluetooth keeps running full-time. need all-day? the slim model runs indefinitely off any USB power bank. (these are real measured charge-to-empty numbers, not spec-sheet guesses.)

the battery version reads its charge from voltage, not a dedicated fuel-gauge chip, so the number is a close estimate, not a lab reading. two things make it sway. the radios draw power in bursts, so under heavy scanning the voltage sags and the percent dips a few points, then climbs back when the load eases. and a lithium cell holds a nearly flat voltage through the middle of its charge, so the reading can sit on one number for a long stretch and then move faster near full and near empty. the firmware smooths it so it steps instead of flickering, but expect a few percent of drift either way. read it as a fuel gauge, not a stopwatch: full, half, and getting low are what it's good for. (the slim version runs on USB power, so it has no battery readout at all.)

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.

no. log exports and improve detection reports are files the app writes in its own private space. when you share one, the system share sheet opens and you pick exactly where it goes. nothing is uploaded automatically. the app never asks for a storage permission and cannot see your photos or files.

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.

for almost everything it hears, where you were, not where the device is. the beacon has no GPS, so it can't know where a camera or tracker actually sits, but signal strength tells it roughly how close you got, so it drops the pin at your closest pass, the spot where you were closest to the thing. read a pin as "this was in range of me around here," not "the device is right at this dot." for a tracker, the app also draws a dashed trail of where you were each time it heard the tracker, so if the same one keeps riding along your whole route, you can see it. the one exception is drones: they broadcast their own GPS in their remote ID, so a drone's pin is where the drone actually says it is, plus a second pin for the operator, which the drone also reports.

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

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. and you can push it forward yourself: the app's improve detection tool, on the Beacon tab, captures something you're sure was broadcasting but the beacon missed and sends me the log, which is how a lot of new signatures start. 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.