Making sure that your bike is well protected with a lock is one thing, but having the ability to check its location at any time on your mobile device is infinitely better.
Skylock was designed as a solar powered bike lock that connects to your smartphone and the cloud. The connection is required not only for sharing the location of the bike, but also for locking or unlocking this gadget. Shaped like an U-lock that cyclists are ever so familiar with, Skylock has a lean learning curve, most of its functions being quite intuitive.
The added safety measures make Skylock ideal for anyone who owns a bike and rides it frequently. The lack of a key means that there’s one thing less for you to lose or misplace. On top of that, picking the Skylock is impossible, and supposing that someone is evil enough to use brute force in order to release your bike (both from the post and from your ownership), the built-in accelerometers will trigger an alarm on your smartphone.
So how does this work? Skylock can be unlocked using the smartphone or by entering a code on its capacitative screen.
Next, Skylock can tell if you’ve had an accident, and if you don’t confirm on your smartphone that you’re OK, it will alert local authorities. Connecting the bike to a Wi-Fi network enables you to control Skylock from a distance, so if your friends need your bike, you can easily unlock it for them.
Gerardo Barroeta, Skylock’s CTO, reassured people that powering this gadget is nothing they need to worry about: “I’ve devoted about 10 years of my career to developing low-power systems. We had to make this from scratch and really engineer it to have basically no friction. One full hour of sunlight puts enough juice to run the device for a week.”
Skylock is currently available for pre-order as part of a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign. It can be yours for $159, which is quite steep for a bike lock, but given the features, I’d say that the price is justified. After all, you don’t get to see everyday a bike lock that connects to the cloud via Wi-Fi, shares your location on mobile devices and alerts emergency services in case of unfortunate events.
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We are sure all of you have seen the episode of the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon, Leonard, Raj and Howard send the internet signal around the world to turn on the lamp in their apartment, right? And when Penny asks “Why?” the answer is simple “Because we can.” Duh.