I am taking a break from all the heavy technical jargon today to tell a funnier story from around the house: how we tracked down my daughter's missing Nintendo Switch. It all started yesterday while I was trying to link my Xbox Live account to Minecraft so she and her sister could play together on my new private family Minecraft server I set up for them (which is a whole story for another day, probably over on the Frizzle Tech Blog). Everything was going fine right up until we asked my daughter where her Switch actually was, and she had no idea. So we played twenty questions with her: where do you remember playing it, and what do you remember doing with it last? She came up with a time she had played it, just not the time we were looking for. Then my wife mentioned that she thought she saw her playing it on the couch the weekend before, on Saturday, October 24th.
Normally, our default move when something vanishes with a date attached is to check our Reolink cameras to see if we can spot the item being used that day. The catch is that we do not actually have a camera pointed at our couch; our camera is angled to watch the front door and a few windows as a security camera rather than pointing where we sit and hang out most of the time. That is very much by design, since I have long since moved away from the days of having a webcam pointed at me 24/7 in my living room (those of you who read this blog way back in 2005 and 2007 might remember that experiment, which in hindsight I am delighted to say nobody ever really watched anyway... yet, I digress). Sure enough, we checked the footage for October 24th and came up completely empty.
Since we had no clue where to look next and I have been on a bit of an AI kick lately, I wondered what would happen if I asked my AI to solve the mystery for me. I pulled out my phone, opened up Antigravity, and told it to search my network and IP history for any Nintendo Switch that left our Wi-Fi network in the past week and never came back, and to check for any correlation between when that Switch disconnected and when we might have left the house based on location data. Right after I sent the prompt, something else came up, I had stuff to do, and I walked away and completely forgot about it until after dinner. While I was talking with my wife later that evening, she wondered out loud if AI could help us figure out where the Switch went. I laughed and said, "Oh, I already asked it," which reminded me to actually check my phone.
Waiting on my screen was a mountain of detective work. It had pulled a log of every Nintendo device on our network: three Nintendo Switches, a Wii U, and even a fourth Nintendo device that had not been at our house for over a month because my wife let a friend borrow it (which the AI smartly ruled out on its own since I had asked about the past week). I thought it was pretty funny that ninety percent of this detective work actually came straight from Home Assistant, which quietly saves the state of visible MAC addresses on our network through an integration I installed; Home Assistant came to the rescue, and AI just gave me a fast way to connect the dots. Even better, the very first thing the AI noticed instantly validated my wife's intuition: the missing Switch had vanished on Saturday, October 24th, the exact day she remembered!
Digging into the logs, the AI found that the Switch was connected to our home network on October 24th right up until 2:07 PM, when it suddenly suffered a huge burst of packet loss and disconnected for good. Anyone who knows a little bit about networks can picture what was happening there; a device riding away in a car is going to experience heavy packet loss right before the connection falls apart at the edge of the Wi-Fi range. Because Home Assistant also tracks the location of my phone, my wife's phone, and our Tesla (since I use TeslaMate to log all the car data into Home Assistant), the AI showed that at 2:07 PM on the dot, our phones started accelerating away from the house. It mapped out our entire Saturday marathon: first to Guitar Center for one of my daughters' drum lessons, then to Alderwood Mall to buy a birthday gift for a friend, then to the friend's birthday party, followed by downtown Woodinville where the restaurants were doing trick-or-treating a week early, and finally a church trunk-or-treat event with kids' activities before we got home around 7:00 PM.
Then came the funniest deduction of the whole report. Because the AI knew from TeslaMate that the Tesla stayed parked at home all afternoon, it knew we had taken the Honda Odyssey instead! Home Assistant does not directly track the Odyssey anymore; I used to keep a tracking device plugged into it, but I pulled it out recently because we have not been driving the van much and leaving that dongle plugged in slowly drained the battery while sitting in the driveway (though this whole episode made me wonder for a second if I should put one back in, right before I realized that tracking our phones already tells us everywhere that van goes anyway). Since the Switch never reconnected to our Wi-Fi when we got home at 7:00 PM, we had our actionable clue: my daughter had brought the Switch into the Odyssey, the battery in the switch had died while we were out, and it was still hiding somewhere inside that van.
I headed out to the driveway with my daughter and started digging around the Odyssey, checking between the seats and in pockets while trying to think where a kid would stash a console. We always remind our girls never to leave valuables sitting out visible in the car when we go into a store (ideally you bring it with you, or at least hide it out of sight), so we figured she must have tucked it away somewhere clever. Right in the middle of the search, my daughter suddenly said, "I gave it to mom. I know, I must have given it to mom." This is a thing they always do; I give her grief, but she always accepts the items they give her.
Anyway... that changed the whole search strategy. Knowing my wife, if she is sitting somewhere and someone hands her something, she is somewhat predictable; either going to carry it around with her in her purse (we know that didn't happen because the thing is lost), or she is going to put it down in front of her or right next to where she is sitting. Since she rides in the passenger seat, I checked the center console right next to her first, and it was not there. Then I checked under the passenger seat, and it was not there either. Finally, I thought for a second; what is directly in front of her? The glove box! I popped open the glove box, and sure enough, sitting right inside was the missing Nintendo Switch - and as a bonus prize, right next to it was our other daughter's old deactivated cell phone that she uses as a camera, which we did not even realize was missing yet :). AI and Home Assistant got us to the right car, but it still took knowing my wife's habits to crack the last two feet of the mystery.
Later,
SteveO