Business idea: Make something like the iPhone's snitching low power bluetooth thingy for bikes. I am sure bike owners will glad run an app which monitors the surrounding for stolen bluetooth beacons. Make it work so it can be barricaded in the seat tube or integrated into the frame, not easily removed or destroyed. Make stealing cheap bikes risky and troublesome. Nothing will protect a 5k$ sports bike.
FYI an alternative is you can get tiny GPS trackers about the size of the top of your thumb for about the same price as the various Bluetooth LE options (about 20 Euros on Alibaba. Stick a SIM in them and put it on the bike, underneath the seat hidden etc and they are pretty decent, can last up to two weeks without recharging. Plus they are more likely to work and much much easier to track down your bike as you can use various apps to track in real time.
What do I type into google to buy this? A bit of searching has not turned up anything similar to what you describe :( Lots of ads for Tile and similar (aka not GPS trackers).
The Guardian bike tracker is one potential option. I would caution against a generic bluetooth tracker, I am not sure if you can integrate it with a SIM card easily.
So like a lock? It's an arms race, and if these things did really take off, bike thieves would find a way to defeat them (easy enough to detect if a bike has one after all).
Also it's not as if many many iPhones aren't being swiped on the streets of London either.
No, a lock is easy to remove/destroy. It's at most a minute with the right tool (angle grinder), and the bike itself is left unaffected.
A tracking device though would be embedded inside the frame itself, and thus not be removable without cutting up (and thus likely destroying) the frame. The frame is the single-most valuable component on a bike.
> The frame is the single-most valuable component on a bike.
Depends. And parts can be fenced with much less risk than entire bikes. I doubt that trackers provide any actual safety improvement, neither in the small (what will you do with the information you might get?) nor in the big (will trackers eventually reduce the number of thieves?).
What might help, I think, are serial number registries. Rohloff hub serials can be registered by owners and checked by would-be buyers, which I think does have some of the desired effect of making those bikes less attractive to thieves.
I’m not that knowledgeable about what materials can be used to construct one, but doesn’t “embedded into the frame” mean “embedded in a Faraday cage”? Or could one use the frame as an antenna?
Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I have the hope the frame itself may be used as antenna.
Contrary to what the other commenter said, this is not attractive for carbon frame owners as I wasn't thinking GPS tracking, but low power, snitching networks (like Apple's stuff, where the stolen iPhone only needs to be seen by another iPhone; or like corona tracking). How often do you see a carbon bikes in the wild? A frame like that may also have other components worth destroying the frame over.
Yes, you'd need to handle the antenna issue. As far as engineering problems go though that's not a particularly hard challenge. Phones and laptops with metal cases have no problem with this despite a lack of external antennas.
Bicycle frames have to be a lot stronger than phones and laptops. That means greater wall thickness (I think ½ mm is on the lower side for steel bicycle tubing)
Already exists. A friend has his expensive bike with this system stolen, he tracked it back a few months down the road when it was found by a receiver.
