Find My Car Smart Uses Bluetooth Smart to Geotag Your Spot Automatically

Posted by | 12/18/2011 | 1 Comment

Geotagging with your smartphone is a useful tool for remembering where you parked your car, but only if you remember to geotag it in the first place. That moment of memory lapse is what Find My Car Smart aims to patch.

A new Kickstarter project, Find My Car Smart, uses Bluetooth Smart (a.k.a. Bluetooth 4.0) to automatically geotag your parking spot whenever you park your car. Here’s how it works:

On the car side, a Bluetooth Smart USB dongle plugs in to your lighter via a USB power adapter. Starting your car powers up the dongle, which connects to your iPhone 4S, launching the Find My Car Smart app in suspended mode. After you drive to your destination and park the car, the BT dongle powers off and that tells the app to geotag the location. After that, you can go about your business and when you’re ready to return, fire up the app to find your way back to the car. It works just like any other geotag system except the geotag gets dropped automatically, no manual input involved.

For now, the project is only for iPhone and only for the 4S since that’s the only one with Bluetooth Smart. No mention of other platforms yet, but Bluetooth Smart isn’t a widespread standard yet (aside from the 4S, the only other smartphone currently released with BT Smart is the Motorola RAZR).

A pledge of $25 gets you the dongle and the app, while $30 adds a USB car adapter to the package. They claim getting the dongle direct from a distributor (like this one) will run you $40. Given that I can’t find a Bluetooth Smart USB adapter for sale yet, I’ll assume they’re telling the truth on that. As of this writing, they’ve exceeded their goal of $10,000. Looks like another Kickstarter success story in the works.

 

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Category: Accessories, Apps

About the Author (Author Profile)

My name is Mark Sumimoto; I am Sumocat. I dabble in all areas of mobile computing, but my focus is Windows-based Tablet PCs and pen input. They’ve been part of my arsenal since 2004, and I’m proud to have pioneered the field of ink blogging, earning a spot as a Microsoft MVP for Touch and Tablets in the process. My current tools include a Fujitsu Lifebook T900, TEGA v2, and iPhone 4. Email me: sumocat [at] notebooks.com
  • http://twitter.com/FMCSmart FMC Smart

    Mark,

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    Get in touch with us if you’d like to write up a full review.

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