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For all the niggas talking about GPS trackers, I'm an Electronic Engineer. I'm currently designing one from scratch.
I live in the UK and here there is a pretty cool option for the GSM bit of this: giffgaff. If I top up every 3 months I get free calls and texts to giffgaff, but the cool part is that data is quite cheap when you don't have a plan, it's like 5p/Mb. A tracker won't use even 1Mb in several hours of hardcore tracking, so I guess I'll go with that.
I'll be using a decent GPS unit to track the location of the bike, with a pretty good antenna so that there's the chance of getting signal even in a building.
For the user interface I had a website in mind, just a google map with a layer of the last 100 locations or something like that. It should be fairly easy to implement.
I thought about using an accelerometer for activation. I know a couple of accelerometers which allow you to put them to sleep consuming virtually nothing, but they can fire an interrupt if they detect some movement, I could then use that interrupt to activate the rest of the system. It would enable the GSM module and send a text to my phone with a link to the website, and then enable the GPRS to send the location to the server. Texas Instruments have a whole family of microcontrollers that would be perfect for this.
For the battery part I'd probs go with one, two, or three iPhone 6 Plus batteries. Super light and massive in capacity. With these TI microcontrollers and some other trickery I could probably get a good 12 months if not more standby time and several days of tracking, depending on update frequency.
The only bits I'm not sure about are stuff like where to hide this whole thing. The electronics would fit just fine inside the handlebar, but the batteries would not. Also the antenna would need to be pretty much open to the air. Any ideas?
I recently bought a $1.2k bike and I don't want it stolen to begin with, but if it is I'll find the niggers.
Pic related I guess.
