Having something stolen is a terrible experience to go through especially when it comes to tracking down your goods. Giving a description of the item to the police often results in them looking for a needle in a haystack. What if you were able to give the police the exact GPS co-ordinates of your item? This TinyTracker GPS/GSM/CAN shield for Teensy 3.1/3,2 lets you do just that.
The shield was designed by Fusion and they provide a list of uses for the board which are either currently in use or have been tested and could work. One story is of an electric bicycle rental company that wants extra security for their bicycles. The board can be used to send back data from the bicycles existing cycle computer to a remote server for getting data about bicycle use like average trip length as well as sending back GPS data for bicycle tracking.
This TinyTracker has also been added to expensive quadcopters to send its position to a remote server every ten seconds. Its current location can also be requested by SMS. Another interesting application is the daily tracking of a Ford delivery van including information like battery state, fuel state and other CAN data. The included CAN bus on this device makes for some really interesting vehicle tracking/logging projects.
This board is really quite tiny, measuring only 3.2cm X 1.75cm. It can fit into a tube with an inner diameter of 22mm which happens to be the size of most bike handlebars meaning you could make a hidden theft tracking device for your bike! A dynamo attached to the wheel so the thief keeps the batteries topped off for that extra hit of sweet revenge when they are inevitably tracked down.
