🤖 Find my Robot

IP Tracker is Back... This is a tool to find robots local IP address's.

The live version of this is available at FindMyRobot.services.lcas.group

Robots report their hostname and IPv4 addresses to a small Flask app, which shows them in a filterable table with a geo-located public IP and a colour-coded last-ping time.

Routes

Route	Description
GET /	Web page: filterable table (25 rows per page), sorted by last ping, then name, then private IP. Supports light and dark mode.
GET /api/robots	JSON list of robots.
POST /api/ping	Robots update their record. Body: {"name": "Bob", "privateIP": "10.0.0.0", "publicIP": "5.5.5.5"}

Last ping colour: green within 10 minutes, orange within 30, red within 60, grey after that.

Location is looked up from the public IP using ip-api.com (free tier, HTTP only, rate limited) and cached until the robot's public IP changes.

Project layout

• app.py - Flask routes
• model.py - SQLite database access
• ip_tools.py - IP validation and location lookup
• templates/, static/ - HTML, CSS (style.css) and JS (app.js)
• scripts/install-robot-service.sh - robot-side installer

Run locally

Requires uv.

uv run app.py

Then open http://localhost:3464. Data is stored in robots.db (override with DB_PATH).

Robots not seen for 14 days are deleted automatically (override with RETENTION_DAYS).

Container

docker build -t find-my-robot .
docker run -p 3464:3464 -v robots:/data find-my-robot

The image is Alpine based, runs gunicorn as a non-root user and stores its database in /data. A GitHub workflow publishes it to ghcr.io/lcas/find-my-robot.

Robot setup

On each robot, run as root:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lcas/find-my-robot/main/scripts/install-robot-service.sh | sudo bash

Defaults are https://findmyrobot.services.lcas.group and 5 minutes, so leave them out for simplicity. The script installs a systemd service and timer (find-my-robot.service / find-my-robot.timer) that POST to /api/ping using:

• name: the robot's short hostname
• privateIP: source address of the default route
• publicIP: from https://api.ipify.org

Check status with systemctl list-timers find-my-robot.timer and journalctl -u find-my-robot.service.