Create A Motorcycle GPS Tracker From An Old iPhone

You can buy an old iPhone off eBay with a cracked screen for about £40.00 or you might well have an old iPhone4 sitting around in a drawer gathering dust. It might be fine, it might have a big crack or smashed glass front that you can’t be bothered to repair. Well put that to good use by creating a free Motorcycle GPS tracking system.

A Bike tracking system is fairly straight forward – you need a device on the bike with a GPS and the ability to query it remotely. Several specialist devices exist for this kind of thing, but all cost money!

An iPhone 4 has cellular/data service and GPS capability and there are a number of Apps that perform this function, but they have to be running, and a key requirement of a tracker is that it requires zero management – it needs to just work. So the tracking App had to run as a service i.e. it needed to run automatically. Therefore it needed to be built into iOS, and that really only leaves Find My Friends (FMF). Yes Find My iPhone would work too, but that isn’t quite as convenient and also doesn’t include the Notify capability of FMF.

So I reset the iPhone to make sure everything personal on it was removed, and then setup a brand new iTunes account. Stored all the details somewhere safe. After installing the Find My Friends App on the phone, I sent it a friend request from my own account – accepted this and confirmed I could see it ok. I renamed it “My Bike” for convenience.

Power
Obviously an iPhone has it’s own battery, a freshly reset iPhone with no push email account or Apps using data in the background actually holds it charge pretty well, but even so the best I was going to get was about 2 days from the phone battery alone. I needed to power my tracker somehow, and on a bike that’s not a particularly hard thing to achieve. I installed an auxiliary 12v ignition feed under the seat with a female cigarette lighter adapter on the end. Then I simply got a £1 cigarette lighter to USB charger, and connected the iPhone up using the standard Apple cable and secreted it away in the rear tail unit where it couldn’t be seen.

Now when the bike is running it charges the phone, when its not running the iPhone will power itself for about 18 hours. After a couple of weeks driving to and from work in the morning and evening I removed the iPhone to check the battery status and it will showing 100% so the time spent charging is greater than the time spent discharging – which is perfect.