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by phurley 3564 days ago
It does not look like your target market, but I imagine this would be ideal for pet/valuable tracking. Put it in a collar or bike seat and if your fido goes for a stroll and does not come back you can search much faster with an easy drive down the road. Same thing to help find a stolen bike.

If the transmitter could be inductively charged in a dog crate or where I park my bike -- it would be very convenient too. Ping time could be much slower, even once a minute would be plenty fast. Appears you could get 24 hours transmit and gps without too much trouble in a pretty small package.
3 comments
slewis 3564 days ago
Shawn from Beep here. It's definitely an interesting area for us. We've created a tracker demo but don't have any information on our site about it yet.

I love the idea of inductively charging the dog tracker when the dog is in bed (though we're unlikely to pull that off anytime soon given the state of wireless charging).

You can do a lot with battery life if you only turn the GPS radio on when the user wants to locate the item. This type of product requires really good network coverage. We could make one last for 4-5 months on a single AAA battery.

If you want it to check in every 10 minutes with GPS data it would only last for 3.5 days. If you get smart with an accelerometer you can push that out to 1-4 weeks or more depending on how much the thing you're tracking moves around.

It's a fun product area with lots of parameters to tweak!

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a13n 3564 days ago
Seems like the police could bait bikes with this technology to make a serious dent on bike theft in their city.
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wyager 3564 days ago
They could already do that with APRS if they wanted to.
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aceperry 3564 days ago
You'd have to hide the antenna well to do this.
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retbull 3564 days ago
Inside the frame would still work just fine if you used the frame as the antenna and if they want to get it out they have to destroy the bike so they're out a any money they were intending to make anyway.
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jamiequint 3564 days ago
FWIW this already exists, just over cellular networks instead. Works well enough for the pet use case though: http://www.whistle.com/ is one, I think there are a couple others also.
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