The challenge
MONA Museum in Tasmania puts a device in every visitor's hand—at the time, a fleet of over 1200 iPods. For the tour guide application running on them to respond to where a visitor was, the museum itself had to be instrumented. Art Processors engaged us on both halves of that problem: location tracking with beacons, and a custom charging system for the fleet.
What we built
AP Locate is a Bluetooth beacon. We did the PCB design and the firmware, and the beacons delivered location services to an iOS application. We built it in 2013—by our own account possibly the first such service, and well before Apple's.
Still running
Writing in November 2017, five years into the MONA partnership, we reported that all of the original mass iPod charging hardware we developed, assembled and tested was still in operation, serving 100,000+ visitors to MONA Museum each year—and that we were at that point working with Art Processors to update it.
AP Locate is the location half of that MONA program. The charging half is the TAP-109 Charging Bay. Art Processors have since taken the same approach into cultural spaces worldwide.
