Mountain and road bike crime is a thing. South Africa’s nauseatingly intense car hijacking and theft trends reflect in bicycling, too.
Most riding groups have horror stories of hijackings. Or of riders walking into the garage to start that early morning group ride only to discover their bike has been stolen.
Necessity is the source of greatest innovation. Some very clever Canadian mountain bikers, who are also electronic engineers, have applied themselves to the problem of tracking stolen bikes. Their solution? Snik.
More potent than an AirTag
This digital tracker is designed to be tamper-proof, easily integrated into your bike’s steerer, and isn’t range limited – when it starts signalling. The issue with Apple AirTags is that they alert a thief of their presence and only work when other Apple users are in range. It’s a limited ecosystem.
Snik is different. Like many of the more popular on-bike multitools, it threads and secures into your bike’s steerer. That means it is out of the way but also tamper-proof.
You need a proprietary tool to fasten and extract the Snik, each using a unique fastening bolt. Even if thieves notice or suspect it, they can’t pry it from the fork steerer and destroy Snik.
There’s a SIM card inside
But how does it work? The Snik has a sim card and both cellular and GPS antennas. That gives it very potent signalling, which is exactly what you want when your bike gets stolen, and people are trying to trace it.
Powering the Snik is an energy-dense lithium-ion battery, while a dual-band microprocessor drives the signalling code and software. That sim card passes data to a mobile application, which enables notifications.
Once paired with a Smartphone, Snik will ping you the moment your road or mountain bike is moving without you on it.
Very logical UX
Collaboration and data sharing greatly increase the odds of tracing and recovering a stolen bike. Snik enables this by allowing non-Snik users to join a digital map which indicates your stolen bike’s progress in red dots while illuminating the presence of other searchers in green.
The Snik searching interface also features a live chat field below the stolen bike tracing map, which is a great way of keeping up a search’s momentum.
Clever Bluetooth pairing automatically ‘locks’ your bike when you are done riding and dismounted, arming your Snik device.
For now, Snik is a North American market product. But the team is desperately keen to expand its networking globally, empowering riders to track and trace their bikes. Pricing? The Snik device is R2700, and a monthly security signalling subscription is R135.
Not cheap. But what’s the monthly insurance on your R150 000 mountain bike? Exactly.
Source: News24
