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Apple Airtag location history — data pipeline & dog tracking dashboard

Episode n+1 of using overkill tech to build simple data pipelines in order to learn about how they work.

While you can use the official Find My app on your Mac to track your Apple devices sadly (or not — for privacy reasons) it doesn’t keep any location history which makes it hard to trace routes in order to see where your precious devices might have gone / be going.

In particular I was interested in the path of my dog, Misha, on off-leash walks and hikes.

Misha, named after and equally fierce brown bear.

As usual — all the code used in this project can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/danthelion/airtag-locator

E(xtract)

To build a dashboard where I can draw the route Misha took first I need to get the data from the Airtag. The only possible way I found to do this was to extract it from the Find My apps cache, located at {HOME}/Library/Caches/com.apple.findmy.fmipcore/Items.data .

This cache is a json file which contains all kinds of metadata about tracked devices. But for now we are only interested in the location properties; latitude and longitude.