LoJack for Bicycles
At UCSB, everyone has to have a bike. I had a bike that was about three years old and I was planning on taking it with me to college. Then, at my high school's grad night, I won a bike from Doctor J's bike shop. It's a 2006 Specialized HardrockSport mountain bike. It's pretty nifty!
How cool is that?
Anyway, I'm kind of nervous about taking it to UCSB because everyone warns you that bike theft is common. I know you can register your bike with the CSO but I'm not sure that's enough. I have a lock but I'm not sure I can trust it considering that Kryptonite bike locks can be instantly opened with a Bic pen. So how do you keep your bike from getting stolen?
I was thinking about putting a GPS unit on my bike so I could track it. Kind of like LoJack but for bikes. My idea is to put a GPS personal locator, like the watch from Wherify, inside the bike's frame. Wherify charges about $150 for the unit but perhaps I could find one cheaper on eBay. However, they also charge around $10 a month for the monitoring service. So, my hope is that I can find a cheap Wherify unit and somehow do a Google Maps hack similar to Google RideFinder to keep tabs on the location of my bicycle. Maybe once I do my own, I can buy a bunch of the watches and start a business tracking students' bikes. Contact me if you think you can help.
Tags: UCSB, bike locks, LoJack, GIS, GPS
1 Comments:
A friend and I were JUST discussing this idea a few weeks ago as well and have a pretty good framework of how-to and what needs to be in place to get this done. I was just doing a Google search to see if prior art existed and funny enough its ALL been people on blogs suggesting the idea (see Halfbakery.com). Anyway contact me if you are interested in talking some more about. temi[At Symbol][mit][a dot goes here][edu]
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