Playing Hide & Seek with the TrackR Pixel

I don’t know about you but if there’s one thing I can never find when I’m leaving the house, it’s either my keys or my phone. I don’t know why but when it’s time to leave the house and I’ve spent 20 minutes pulling arms through sleeves and cajoling the offspring toward the door, I’m always left hunting around for one or the other. The TrackR Pixel is a handy little gizmo that uses Bluetooth to pinpoint its own location and report this back to an app on your phone.

If you’ve got your phone in hand you can use the app to wake up the Pixel (which you would hopefully have attached to your keys) and it whistle-beeps its whereabouts loudly in the immediate vicinity. Likewise if you have the Pixel in-hand and can’t find your phone, pressing a small button on the device will set off the app and your phone will ring loudly to announce where it is (usually stuffed into the sofa somewhere).

The pixel itself is not a GPS tracker but due to a growing network of users, it is able to use a system called Crowd Locate. This means that if another TrackR user passes by your device it will be able to see it and use your app to tell you its last reported location.

To put the Trackr Pixel through its paces, I enlisted the help of some people who live in my house and are regularly losing my (and their own) stuff; my kids.

  

Round 1 – Hide the keys

I attached the Pixel to an ordinary set of house keys and asked my minions to hide them somewhere out of sight while I counted to 10. After a brief period of thundering and cackling the children returned with huge grins on their faces having well and truly lost the keys. I opened the app and was met with a really simple interface. Using Bluetooth to pinpoint the device in relation to the phone, you can view the approximate location on a small map on your phone. One would assume this map is really useful when using the Crowd Locate functionality but when inside my house it predictably just showed me where my house is.

Luckily, the app could still help me to locate my keys in a jiffy. I tapped the big button in the centre of the display and could immediately hear a squeaky tune coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms. I tapped the button a couple more times as I advanced on the beeping and eventually discovered the keys nestled between the remains of Hug Time Poppy and a stuffed Elmo.

Dad wins!

Round 2 – Hide the phone

Having successfully put the TrackR Pixel’s key-finding capabilities to the test, it was time to see how well I could find my phone. I reluctantly handed my phone to the most trusted offspring and put them to the task of hiding it from me. After 5 minutes had elapsed, I’d begun to suspect they’d closed the app altogether and started doing a little bit of internet shopping but soon after they came trundling back empty-handed.

I pressed the tiny button on the TrackR Pixel and off in the distance of the house I heard a faint tune. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen so I headed towards the noise. I pressed the button again to set off more musical guidance and, lo and behold, the breadbin began emitting a cheerful tune. I retrieved my phone from inside and claimed my victory.

Dad wins again!

Conclusion

The TrackR Pixel is a great way to keep track of your small items using Bluetooth. There’s obviously always going to be a difference in effective distance when you compare it to more expensive GPS locating devices but considering the TrackR Pixel retails for about £25, the product is exactly what it says on the tin. The app is also straightforward. This could easily have been complicated with unnecessary functionality or bulky, crash-happy code but it simply loads up and does the job effectively.

If you’re a forgetful type like me and want to be able to leave the house without dismantling the sofa, then you could do a lot worse than grabbing one of these little gizmos and if you use the code SUPERPARENT when purchasing directly you can get 15% off!

Disclaimer: This post is littered with affiliate links. We have to pay for the flying monkeys somehow.