Road Angel Bike Trac

AndyCr15

AndyCr15

AndyCr15

Soldato
Joined
28 Apr 2011
Posts
15,419
Location
Barnet, London
I just wondered if any of you have any experience of this tracker. A friend had it on his Fireblade and was telling me about it, sounds very good.

Mind you, he was telling me because the 'crash detection' had falsely told his other half he was laying in the road somewhere...

Still, I'm always very paranoid about my bike being nicked, it would be good to have something I can check on my phone that it's not gone anywhere.
 
No experience of this one, but I've been wondering how hard can it be to hook up a Raspberry pi with a 3G dongle and a GPS detector, and use that as a tracker instead?

I guess it's not exactly subtle, but may end up being cheaper....
 
For cheapness an android phone 2nd hand cheapy would do it. Track gps
Wire it in to the battery, when not in use in a garage put it on a optimate or similar.

Just have to feed the phone with a data tarrif, mine is 20 quid for six months.

With a bit of *******ization you could use the camera to record video as well.


Bullit
 
Dogbreath said:
Power consumption would be a major problem with that solution.
Click to expand...

I've got a canbus -> micro usb lead. Think the socket can supply up to 5A, and the pi only needs 1A.

bullit in head said:
For cheapness an android phone 2nd hand cheapy would do it. Track gps
Wire it in to the battery, when not in use in a garage put it on a optimate or similar.

Just have to feed the phone with a data tarrif, mine is 20 quid for six months.

With a bit of *******ization you could use the camera to record video as well.


Bullit
Click to expand...

Thinking about it, this is a much, much better approach, given I can power it off the same cable. Only problem I can forsee with such a thing is telling it to power on when it receives power via the bike (ignition on), and the fairly slow boot-up time. Going to go investigate this approach and stop sidetracking the thread :)
 
just leave it turned on all the time.... you can then check up on it, with a gps phone trace... it wont use much power at all if constantly plugged in . and all other stuff turned off( battery saver) so no bluetooth or wifi. just gps and data. it'll last for ages. and if you leave it on a trickle charger/optimate it'll last forever powered on.

bullit
 
Yeah, I had thought you could have an Android (or other) app written, a cheap phone hidden on the bike which would even know if you crashed and other things.

Anyway, so no-one knows much about the 'proper' trackers?

Tracker themselves sound good (albeit £100+ more over 3 years) but not being able to transfer it to a different bike seems a bit of a deal breaker to me. Them using VHF apparently makes it harder for thieves to shield the signal. Mind you, it also means you can't keep an eye on location or check battery level and such, so only any use when the bike has actually been nicked.
 
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