2 ms·
Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to
by msandford 12y ago
Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke.
Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to power the thing. The transistors might be getting exponentially cheaper but the batteries aren't. And you need quite a bit of batteries to make this happen.
If you can get a fix to a warehouse you're OK but once the pallets go into an intermodal shipping container and stacked, you're SOL. Shipping container bottoms are made out of wood, not steel so sitting up on a truck they can still get signals. But once they're stacked you're in a world of hurt. Sure the containers might pop back onto the grid once they get unstacked but that might happen once they're out of the country, potentially to countries where you don't have subsidiaries who can go get them back.
So you have two fixed costs: batteries and data/cellular. You have to buy these and you have to pay for them on an ongoing basis. I think what would end up happening is that your battery and data (and plastic recycling and lo-jack refurbishing) costs will end up eating whatever profits you might manage to eke out such that it's not that great of a business to be in.
- Retric 12y agoIMO, one random update per week is good enough to get most of the value from lojacking the things which would drastically lower your power needs. Probably not low enough for parasitic power draw but low enough to spend less than 5$ on the battery.
- gaadd33 12y agoAren't shipping containers steel all around? They do have wooden flooring though, but under that is steel from what I understand.
- msandford 12y agoI'm not around shipping containers day-in and day-out but I don't believe they are. There's SOME metal down there to hold them together but as I understand it they're purposefully not 100% so that if something spills it doesn't pool in the bottom. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzWAj_gea7o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzWAj_gea7o