Is there any way to track apple airtags via Home Assistant?

[thebunk]

Anyone have any idea if the new iOS 17 ability to share Airtags with family could provide easier ways to do this soon?

[sebdoan (Sebastian Doan)]

@ndbroadbent I’m trying to get MACOS running on proxmox too and keep getting stuck in the Ventura installer at the 12 mins to go mark… Did you get that problem?

Update: I was fortunately able to test on another server and it made further progress by not stopping at the 12 min mark (all steps followed exactly the same). Turns out that putting the MacOS’s disk onto a NVME drive causes the 12 min mark issue. If anyone is experiencing this problem I suggest trying the install steps on a different Proxmox Server hardware to see if it makes any difference for you.

For anyone’s benefit I followed this guide which despite the robot voice (the author is likely from Vietnam) was very easy to follow and we’ll explained https://youtu.be/iVolaiH-6W8?si=ICbau9w1YbP2Mq8B

[sebdoan (Sebastian Doan)]

Hey @muehlt and @ndbroadbent I too have started using the muehlt / home-assistant-findmy script.

I’ve observed that any devices with an apostrophe (i.e. John’s AirTag) does not automatically get added as a device tracker to Home Assistant’s MQTT auto discover. Devices without an apostrophe get added fine (i.e. Johns AirTag). The homeassistant documentation is allowing to manually add the device successfully: MQTT Device Tracker - Home Assistant

Can you confirm if you’re also getting this behaviour and if there’s a manual workaround that does not require renaming device names on the Apple account? (Note: I’m aware that removing apostrophes from the apple name is the easiest solution for me at the moment)

[ndbroadbent (Nathan Broadbent)]

Hi @sebdoan, yes I ran into that issue with single quotes and hash characters, and I opened a PR to fix it: Remove hash from device ID to avoid ValueError: Publish topic cannot contain wildcards. by ndbroadbent · Pull Request #13 · muehlt/home-assistant-findmy · GitHub

It was merged in, so you should run “git pull” to fetch the latest changes and try again

[idominiki]

What do you think about this? iCloud3 v3 iDevice Tracker - Version 3 Prerelease version is now available

[gcobb321 (Gary Cobb)]

No. AirTags are not located like an iPhone, iPad or other network type devices. They use low energy Bluetooth to provide location info back to Apple. Apple does not make this available to web base location trackers

[muehlt]

Unfortunately, life is getting in the way at the moment, so I haven’t had the time to test the new release as much as I liked. But you can use the code on GitHub as @ndbroadbent mentioned, if you like .

[sschochet (Steve)]

With the release of iOS 17 AirTag locations are now shareable to others, is it possible the API set is now available to be able to track in HA?

[Mr-HaleYa (Koby Hale)]

You can’t just share them with any old account, you have to be sharing them with an email or phone number that is associated with an Apple ID. The recipient must be running 17+ on the iOS device otherwise it will give you an error telling you you cannot share it to them. Your device must also be running 17+ or the option doesn’t even appear.

In theory somebody could host a couple Apple ID emails on a server then build a web application where you can give them a publicly accessible webhook that points to your home assistant server and share your air tags with them. The server would collect the information of the air tags and forward it back to your home assistant server through the webhook. Sounds very doable. You just have to trust them with all of your location data… This would only work when you’re Internet is accessible, no offline support.

[J0J0 (Jonathan de Jong)]

Oh wow, thank you for making this, i stalled on my own script a while ago, and seeing someone else pick this up and package it properly makes me very happy, good going! :3

[inspgadget]

That’s a great idea. I would make a donation for it.

[BA8870]

I would love to do this but unfortunately not that tech savvy

Does anyone know of a beginner friendly guide to set up macOS in a VM on my DS423+? Is it even possible?? All I would run on it would be findmysync

[Fr0zenflame (Danny)]

I would definitely vouch for it! We have 2 Iphones, an Ipad, 2 Apple watches and 4 AirTags for the kids. It would definitely be a quality of life improvement when we could track those devices and of course our kids (when they are away) … 1, 2,5 and 5 years old. We can do that on our phones ofc, but this would be awesome.

I’ve a running Proxmox 4 node CEPH cluster hosting some Unbuntu docker hosts to provide containers including home bridge, I could host an extra MACOS VM maybe, but I rather like/want a more native way.

Cheers
Danny

[TiToTB]

I think this approach may help

AirTag "integration" (user friendly + device tracker)

Hi everybody! I found a way to “integrate” Apple AirTag into Home Assistant. My aim was that Android users could use these devices (actually cheap “AirTags”) and have access to their location through Home Assistant, to consult their location and create automations. What I have done is create a shortcut that sends the information to a helper in HA, and then create a rest sensor to get the coordinates and finally get a device tracker, so you can use it in a map card and in your automations [C…

[Flotomation]

I did a (German) Video Guide which uses a Proxmox VM and the App Findmy Sync.
Give it a try, I hope subtiles work for you

Youtube How To Guide Proxmox to FindMy Sync

Cheers
Flo / Flotomation

[e-raser]

I digged through this whole thread. Current summary:

There are ways to get AirTag information to HA, but all those depend on having a Mac.

Is that correct or did I miss something?

[smartmatic]

This approach does not: Airtag to HA via Shortcut

But problem from that approach is that you need a unlocked iPhone in order to get the data automatically updated.

[quenthal (Eero Konttaniemi)]

Planning to run this on MacOS VM.

Is it possible to run this for multiple Apple IDs? Or does one need seperate VM for each family member and their tags? Or are new shared tags visible with this app?

[tronicdude (Aidan Gibson)]

Did this work out for you? Historically I’ve had dicey luck logging in to my apple ID on VMed macOS. How did you do it?

[sat-fan2019]

Hi, I’m desperately trying to integrate my geolocations from findmysync into the HA. Unfortunately the API only delivers to http sites. I’ve already found information about sending the whole thing to such a site, but I don’t know exactly where to include it. What is probably necessary is an entry in Ngnix.config that should look like this:

   location /api {
        proxy_pass http://local.server.ip:8123/api;
        proxy_set_header Content-Type application/json;
        proxy_set_header Authorization "Bearer long-token";
    }

or it should work like this:

 location /api {
        proxy_pass http://local.server.ip:8123/api;
        proxy_set_header Content-Type application/json;
        if ($http_authorization != "Bearer <long-tock>") {
        return 401;
    }
        proxy_set_header Authorization $http_authorization;
        proxy_pass_header Authorization;
    }

For me the standard is:

active: false
default: nginx_proxy_default*.conf
servers: nginx_proxy/proxy/*.conf

I have no idea how and where I can get these api instructions into the config - I hope someone can help me. Thanks !