“I’ll hold off upgrading my tortoise tracker until Apple opens things up a bit”

For this month’s column, I’m going to turn pet detective. In the past I’ve often written about using various types of trackers to monitor where your pets roam. In fact, as I write this I can look out of my office window and see our tortoise ambling around in the garden. She looks just like a normal tortoise, with the exception of a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tracker attached to her shell. Being a low-powered Bluetooth tracker, there’s no GPS facility so I can’t use it to plot her route around the garden, but it is useful when we need to locate her. An app gives you a rough distance (but not direction) and, when she’s in range, an audio alert causes the tracker to emit a beep that helps us to pinpoint her position. She tries to hide under shrubs or piles of leaves, but we can always find her.

I’ve been through many different brands of BLE tracker, including well-known names such as Tile and some of the smaller players. The device that’s now Sugrued to her shell is a Nut Find3. I particularly like this device because it’s fairly waterproof and makes frugal use of its battery, often lasting for two years or so on a single CR2032.

It’s half tempting to swap this tracker for one of those new-fangled Apple AirTags, but without a recent iPhone you can’t use ultra-wideband (UWB) communication with the