Everyone needs one of these, not just for your tools, it is 24hr tracking regardless of what property you are trying to keep hold of, just connect it to a cheap tool such as a torch and leave it in PLAIN Sight, it WILL be stolen with your precious personal items, and you WILL find them. Prices are being re-evaluated as we speak as insurance companies and authorities are realising the importance of our product so please ignore the website prices. I am aiming on getting the cost down to £166.99 inc. delivery and no monthly ongoing costs, would really value opinions, thanks.
I’ve played around with this idea in the past. I even bought a few development modules (GPS, GSM, raspberry pi) from RS and got a proof of concept workingI found a few issues with it:
1) If your gear get stolen and you can tell them exactly where it is the police still don’t care. If you go and try to retrieve it yourself you’re fairly likely to end up either getting injured or arrested. This view is based on working for a company that had £200k of plant stolen all with trackers, a friend having an expensive caravan stolen again with a tracker and a family member having a car stolen in all cases the police were beyond useless.
2) Any system like this is fairly easily defeated, all you need to do is put them in a van vault and it can’t get a GPS location or send SMS message with its location.
3) If it is identifiable as a tracker thieves will soon learn to discard it. If you make it look like a Dewalt battery for example you’ve got issue with trade mark infringement.
I came to the conclusion that the best option was to integrate it into the power tool. Develop a module you could licence to the likes Milwaukee and Dewalt. I spoke to a few people in the industry who’s view was:
1) Stolen tools mean more sales of new gear.
2) The margins in power tools are very slim already. They largely make money on the sale of batteries. Making your drill 30% more expensive than a competitors offering was likely to hit sales badly.
3) If tool makers had any interest in this they could easily do in house.
Another consideration is cost. It’s relatively easy to find a company in Asia that will design and manufacture your product but it’s massively more expensive than you think. Ball park figure would be £10-25k. Once you’ve got your product it’s then got to be CE certified to be legally sold in the EU/UK (what happens post Brexit who knows) - £3-5k is a ball park for this depending on how many revisions need to be made. The. You’ve got to provide some sort of monitoring infrastructure/service. You’ll need to provide an app or a web site that shows map locations. Again you’re likely looking in the £15-25k range for that.
Patents are also an issue, there were 100’s relating to GPS/GSM tracking, the owners of which may have something to say about your product. If you want to protect your product with a patent you’re looking at about £40k in l
Add it all up, throw in £100k for advertising and you’ve got to sell an awful lot of trackers to break even.
