Dewalt does this too but if you can really do it for that cheap you’ve got a pretty good idea.
well for one, a cellphone with GPS abilities will cost quite a bit now, if it was to be mass produced, it would still be expensive then the service with a provider will be an added cost, and a GPS subscription would also be a possible cost and if this was to become available, i am sure the cellphone service providers will have their way of sucking our money…
its a great idea tho
hey if you can do it that’d be great, but you need to think in a much bigger scope and you need to take a few things into consideration:
[list=1]
[] cost of materials, if it’s not 20$ or something along those lines, you can’t profit from your low price
[] satellite licensing, you can’t mass market a product that needs gps technology and expect to use a satellite for free (unless of course there is some sort of free satellite out there)
[] yours won’t make police magically paradrop into the vicinity. so a cop would still have to be close, and lojack does infact work on a larger scale than just x-radius. lojack is also popular enough that enough law enforcement folks have the necessary equipment to pick up it’s signal.
[] it’d have to be sanctioned by the government and law enforcement agencies, which = more $$
[] shooting someone in the knee caps even it it’s your property = jail which = no $. it reports back to police for a reason.
[] licensing, licensing, licensing = tons of $$
[*] lojack CAN be $700, cause no one else or not enough people do it as well as they do. if it was THAT simple there’d be more services like it.
[/list]
See i knew if I waited long enough, Simp would come in and say exactly what I wanted to say, but was just too lazy to type out
Sparky and Simp (and ftl if you are actually reading posts instead of just replying), the whole innovation part of this would be to combine GPS with cellular service to offer an automatic location reporting tool. Now both GPS and cellular services are assumed to be available to the user already, since they have a blackberry or iphone or something. In the end, it’s just an ancillary device that uses the services you already pay for.
Again, I’m not trying to make or sell a product. This is just research for a university class. To the consumer, the price justifies this project since it’s basically an amalgamation various existing technologies the user has. From the marketing perspective, there are indeed products out there that provide this specific functionality, but how well either one plays out in this market is up to whoever sells them, and that’s not going to be me.
Sure shane if you want one, I’ll give ya one. But then I’ll know where you live :lol:
[quote=MTsoul;2349291]Sparky and Simp (and ftl if you are actually reading posts instead of just replying), the whole innovation part of this would be to combine GPS with cellular service to offer an automatic location reporting tool. Now both GPS and cellular services are assumed to be available to the user already, since they have a blackberry or iphone or something. In the end, it’s just an ancillary device that uses the services you already pay for.
Again, I’m not trying to make or sell a product. This is just research for a university class. To the consumer, the price justifies this project since it’s basically an amalgamation various existing technologies the user has. From the marketing perspective, there are indeed products out there that provide this specific functionality, but how well either one plays out in this market is up to whoever sells them, and that’s not going to be me.
Sure shane if you want one, I’ll give ya one. But then I’ll know where you live :lol:[/quote]if that is the case then the user would have to buy another phone since he/she would be leaving this in the car and that involves more money, and yes we do understand you arent actually trying to sell this thing but we are merely questioning the practicality of it.
Okay okay okay here’s the deal. It’s assumed the user currently has:
- cell phone (iPhone or Blackberry or some kind of GPS-enabled phone)
- cellular plan that offers GPS and Internet connectivity (through Edge or something)
So this single device would cost say $20, and the user just has to put it in his car and that is it. No leaving cell phones in the car. Nothing. Everything is controlled with the user’s cell phone. No monthly plan.
Obviously leaving this in the car involves money. But it’s negligible compared to the frustration when losing your car and the stuff inside.
So, this device would basically simulate the tracker that is already in the cell phone, and you could tell it to ‘replace’ your current location (as calculated by the cell towers and wi-fi and 3G whatever) with the location of this little tracker, which is inside your car.
It’s pretty much like just taking that tiny little component out of your phone, and putting it in something else, right? (Except you’re duplicating it.)
i have no idea how you will get this to work but from what i understand the device keeps trying to connect to your service, but cant because of your phone, but what if you turn your phone off on accident and the device gets on the network, if you turn your phone back on will it be able to connect to the service or will the device hog it?
[QUOTE=nick P;2349730]i have no idea how you will get this to work but from what i understand the device keeps trying to connect to your service, but cant because of your phone, but what if you turn your phone off on accident and the device gets on the network, if you turn your phone back on will it be able to connect to the service or will the device hog it?[/QUOTE]
That’s the basic idea. I’ll have to look at the communication protocol to see how well that would work. If it has some kind of priority list, it would be ideal so that your phone would always be connected if you turn it on. Otherwise, it defaults to the thing in your car.
It’s really just a cell phone. The difference is, it’s cheap and can only track and report locations (no calling). I can basically use the iPhone and develop a custom software program on it that does all these. But that’s too expensive.
