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Rothar

By 08/11/2014 No Comments

Short description of project

Mobile application for recovery of stolen bicycles

Longer description of project

Visit The Rothar App!

Problem to be solved

  • Lots of bikes get stolen in Dublin (and elsewhere)
  • Hard to track down and recover stolen bikes
  • GPS tracking solutions are expensive
  • RFID/barcode solutions are short distance
  • Commercial solutions tend to be proprietary
  • Bike databases are not linked to physical bikes
  • Gardaí can’t support / promote commercial solutions

Who are the customers?

  • Cyclists who want to protect their bikes

Proposed solution

  • Bluetooth Low-Energy BLE tags attached to bike
  • Tags can be scanned by many mobile phones and other devices
  • BLE tag registered with database
  • Tag can be flagged as stolen
  • Phones can detect nearby stolen cycles.

Links

Project leader

Adam Bednarski

Project team members

Steps already taken to establish that the project is needed

  • Proof of concept Android app
  • Web app
  • Backend DB
  • Backend API

 

Results of checking whether similar projects already exist

None of the found projects is similar to mine. They can be split into 3 categories of solutions:

  1. GPS tracker – active device which in short is embedded phone which reads GPS location and sends to you
  2. RFID tag – passive short distance tag (similar in a way to bar code but using radio waves) which can only be scanned by specialized device from very short distance (1 to 5 centimeters)
  3. DB of stole bikes – quite popular solution, probably works to some extent

My solution is using Bluetooth LE tag which far cheaper than GPS tracker, uses much less energy (so can run longer) and is much easier to read (from distance of 30 to 100 meters) than RFID tag.

Here are solutions which are technically very similar / same as mine: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/bluetooth-tracking-devices/

But they have few problems:

a) commercial only

b) more expensive

c) mostly not using crowd sourcing

d) closed (not allowing for wider analysis of stored information)

e) proprietary (not allowing for expanding and adding features)

f) sometimes bound to one type of mobile device (iPhone)

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