Locate help
How Locate positions warehouses, yards, racks, levels, items, assets, and shared waypoints—and how to set it up and troubleshoot it.
What Locate does
Locate is the warehouse, workshop, and yard positioning capability inside Atlas DataSynch. It combines site coordinates, rack geometry, vertical level information, inventory or asset records, and human observations so a user can search for something and see where it should be or where it was last observed.
The positioning model
Latitude and longitude establish the horizontal position. Locate internally encodes those coordinates as geohash-12 so it can preserve a very fine spatial address when high-quality positioning is available.
Geohash precision and measurement accuracy are different things. A phone may report an accuracy of several meters even though Locate stores the coordinate at geohash-12 precision. Locate keeps the reported accuracy with the observation.
The site datum stores a base elevation above mean sea level. Google Elevation is used as an explicit site setup lookup, not once per item. Internal rack, pallet, and waypoint heights reuse the site datum.
Z is the operational vertical position relative to the site reference, normally the finished warehouse floor or yard grade. Rack levels can therefore be represented as different heights at the same horizontal rack location.
How rack mapping works
- 1. Choose the warehouse, workshop, or yard and establish its site datum.
- 2. Stand at the beginning of a rack and capture the rack start position.
- 3. Move to the opposite end and capture the rack end position.
- 4. Enter the number of bays and levels plus bay width, rack depth, aisle width, first-level height, and level spacing.
- 5. Locate generates the intermediate storage positions and their Z heights instead of requiring every slot to be individually captured.
Inventory and asset data
Locate can use Atlas DataSynch inventory, item, location, and asset records. A company can also feed its own inventory or asset system into DataSynch through a connector, API, webhook, file import, or other integration lane, then normalize those records into the location model used by Locate.
Use DataSynch items, inventory, locations, scans, and related master-table records as the source of the search and map experience.
Keep the company system of record in place and connect it to DataSynch. Locate only needs normalized identity, site/location, quantity or status, and whatever rack, bay, level, coordinate, scan, or observation data is available.
Location sources
The expected location created from the site and rack layout, such as A03 · Bay 17 · Level 4.
A human waypoint recording where an item or asset was actually found, with an optional note, quantity, and Z height.
A position or event supplied by a scanner, RFID reader, UWB system, device, forklift, or other connected source.
Try Locate
Search & map: Search for an item or asset, select a facility marker, then open the facility view to see the internal rack target.
Site & rack setup: Capture the site position, load the site elevation, capture rack endpoints, and create rack positions.
Drop waypoint: When something is found unexpectedly, capture the current phone position and leave a short team note so someone else can return to it.
Troubleshooting
Confirm browser location permission is allowed. Geolocation normally requires HTTPS in production; localhost is allowed for development. Move closer to an exterior wall or doorway if indoor GNSS is weak.
Use the reported GNSS accuracy as the quality indicator. Re-capture the anchor in a better signal location or use a surveyed, RTK, UWB, scanner, RFID, or other higher-quality source when the workflow requires it.
Check the configuration below. The server needs a Google Maps key with the Elevation API enabled. If Google returns REQUEST_DENIED, check API enablement, billing, and key restrictions. After changing a local environment variable, restart the Next.js development server.
The facility needs rack geometry and the item or asset needs a position that resolves to the site, rack, bay, and level. Site-level records can still appear on the facility map even without an internal rack target.
Locate uses an online map layer for the facility overview. Confirm the device has network access and that the map tile requests are not being blocked.
This checks whether the Locate server route can see a configured Google Maps key. It does not expose the key or make an Elevation request.