Motorcycle GPS vehicle tracking system using a smartphone

Okay, so you've got this phone, what do you do with it? Quite simply you hide it on the bike and power it from the battery on your motorcycle. If you're phone has a decent battery on it, then even if the thieves cut the power and remove the battery then your phone should still operate giving away the location of your bike for a few hours. My initial thoughts were to hide it inside the Cheap sim card seat somewhere. Remove the cover, cut out some foam from the passenger seat and install the phone in something waterproof (just in case). The power supply would have to go from the loom to the phone inside the seat somehow and not be obvious. If you're really clever you could probably figure something out with the seat clips. Worst case scenario, label the power cable as a seat warmer so the thieves don't suspect it's a tracking device. There are probably other places to hide the device, that was just my first thoughts on that.

What about connecting the phone to the Internet?

At the time of writing the cheapest sim only contract I could find was Ł5 a month. You'll need some form of contract for the phone so that it can report back it's location. This works out at Ł60 a year for your motorcycle security and tracking system. The cheapest vehicle tracking I've seen after a quick search worked out at around Ł20 a month, so it's an easy choice as far as I can see!

Google Latitude knows where your bike is

motorola milestone So you've got a phone connected and discreetly attached to your bike somehow. The next thing to do is track it and I guess I should have mentioned this before. There's a few things you need to do before you actually install the phone on the bike, unless of course it's still easily accessible. In actual fact, somehow installing it in such a way so that you can get to it and do stuff would be a very good idea. You can track your phone in a number of ways using various mobile apps but the easiest way I can think of to do this is by using Google Latitude. Create a new Google account for your Android (bike) phone, install Latitude. Set it up to share location with yourself and you can then install Latitude on your iGoogle and see where your bike is at all times. Test it out by going for a ride whilst someone monitors your location from a laptop, PC or another smartphone.

Okay so you can track your bike but you're not likely to be staring at a laptop 24/7 are you? With Google Latitude you can turn on location alerts and history. This means when you and your bike are in unusual places or in the usual places at unusual times you'll get an alert. Now I haven't tested this out so I'm offering no guarantees as to the suitability or reliability of this service. It's an easy option though and after a while once it learns your habits it may actually be fine.

However, if the vanilla alert system doesn't work Google have provided an API (application programming interface) for Latitude, this means that fashioning a custom application that tells you when your bike leaves your street at unusual times should be a straightforward task for someone with some programming knowledge. With the way things are going though, I can foresee a whole raft of Latitude based applications becoming available and one of them will almost certainly fit the bill at some point in the future.

Additional Security Measures

It also occurred to me that as these smartphones also have accelerometers and a built in compass, you could also implement an additional layer of security that kicks in before your bike is even on the move. When you park up for the night, an app on your personal phone could be set up to communicate with your bike phone and take an accelerometer position reading from the phone. Once the bike phone is 'armed' it will alert you should the bike be moved and the accelerometer readings move outside a pre-programmed tolerance. Pretty neat huh?

As I said earlier, I haven't actually tried any of this out yet - not much point really as I don't own a motorcycle at present. I'd be interested to hear if any readers have implemented these ideas or have any further thoughts. Motorcycle theft is absolutely rife at the moment and if the police can't or won't catch the criminals without a helping hand, then so be it!