How to Track Your Car with an Old Tile

A Tile is a small Bluetooth tag that you can attach to an item that you think you might lose. Put one on your key chain, for example, and when you lose your keys you can just push a button on the companion app and the tag will chime so you can find it. But, each $10 Tile has a battery that’s only intended to last about a year, and once it dies you’re supposed to buy a new Tile. Alternatively, you can follow Luis Rodriguez’s guide and convert your old Tile into a dedicated car tracker.

Before you start this project, it’s important to note that the Tile does not have any kind of GPS inside of it. It only communicates via Bluetooth, which obviously has a limited range. But, the app will remember the last location where it had contact with a specific Tile. That might make it useful if you forgot where you parked your car. There is also functionality that allows other users to find your lost Tile if they happen to come within Bluetooth range.

As Rodriguez demonstrates, using a dead Tile in your car is easy to do. First you’ll need to pry open the case and remove the dead battery. Then, using a DC-to-DC buck converter, you step down the car’s 12-14V voltage to the 3–3.5V required by the Tile. The last step is to find a place in your car to stash the Tile where it can tap into the 12V supply. The entire process is essentially replacing the dead Tile battery with the battery in your car, which you can continue using indefinitely to track your car.