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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

Non-Apple solution: An ESP8266 which opens Wifi-station "STOLEN_BICYCLE_owner@hotmail". But only for few minutes everyday at 9:11 . Should last for years with small battery.

You can go hunting yourself or hope somebody else sees it. If you manage to connect to this network, you can connect to 192.168.1.11 and turn it permanently on/off and also turn audible beep on, for final pinpointin.

And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.

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Ray Ozzie's new venture was on HN a couple of days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051005

A $50 board with ten years free connectivity in 150 countries.

Perhaps a better candidate than an esp32.

My solution is basically $1. $50 is more than my bicycles are worth.

If you value your time as $0 per hour and get free hardware?

Takes about 10 minutes to design the program. Thereafter you can copy it to new devices in few seconds. Only difference between customers would be the time of day when it turns on. Time is short so that crook has no change to spot it herself. In most neighborhoods you already know where to look for stolen bikes.

I got my first ESP this year. Just getting the IDE set up, testing the first demo project and overally getting accustomed to it took me half a day, if not more.

Saying the design takes 10 min is only true if you already sunk tens of hours into the ecosystem. Sure, if you got the tools and spent time learning it (and dont count it towards the final cost) you can do it cheaply with ESP. For many people going with $50 board thats gonna trully 5 min setup out of the box can actually be cheaper

In the other hand if you see the time investment as a hobby, then the cost of your time is negative.

Those are some cheap bikes in today's market! Even my 1998 Giant Cypress is worth over $100.

> And now that the ESP wakes up everyday, it could also look for public Wifis and send and receive emails. From the Wifi-providers name you can get a rough idea of the location.

Even better, use the Google Maps GeoLocaion API. You can send a list of nearby WiFi APs, with MAC addresses, signal strengths, and channels, and the API will return lat/long.

This idea could scale if you also had a network of people on the lookout for stolen stuff. E g an app on their phone that constantly scans for wifi networks matching your STOLEN pattern (not sure if actually possible on Android/apple).

The searchers could get a bounty of they helped find a stolen object.

Their app could also connect to the device (using a single well known password) and could switch it into fast mode where it transmits constantly instead of once/day. Making it even easier for someone else in the network to find it.

If I were a thief, I'd sign up for the service, find the item that's snitching on me, and search it until I found all the devices on it that were broadcasting its location.

Then the system would have a record that you (the bounty hunter) had had contact with the stolen item (the bike).

You might get away with it once or twice but as a habitual thief this creates quite a trail of evidence about you.

The guys described in the article weren't exactly rocket scientists. And the cops only intervened because the tag's alarm was going off right in front of them while the writer showed them the device info on their screen. It's easy to imagine that, if the thief--who may not even be the store owner--had immediately destroyed the tag, the cops would never have intervened and the guy would never have found their scooter.

> not sure if actually possible on Android/apple.

As it happens I already have similar Burglar Alarm running on Android Termux. So easy it is. This warns when one ESP wakes up and appears on local Wifi.

    import os,json,time                                                         
    os.system("termux-wake-lock")                                               
    os.system("termux-wifi-enable true")                                        
    while True:                                                                 
      r=os.system("ping -c 1 192.168.1.59")                                     
      if r==0:                                                                  
        os.system("termux-volume music 15")                                     
        os.system("termux-tts-speak -l en YOUR GARAGE DOOR IS OPEN!")           
      time.sleep(60)

how and when do you activate it or change the name though?

you don't want it to broadcast STOLEN_BICYCLE while you ride it?

setting up such a system properly probably costs way more (in valuable time) than the Apple solution

There is a button. The button turns it always on, so that you may contact the default server NOT_STOLEN and adjust the stealing parameters to your taste.

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