Today one of my friends called me: some thieves opened its garage and stole his two bikes, his brand new road bike and the one he uses every day to go to work. It is incredible how easy is to steal bikes without getting caught by anyone: there is almost no way to find who stolen your bike and where your bike is. Of course you can buy an expensive GPS tracker (example here) and to be honest I am not sure it will work properly..

My garage, which is by the way my workshop too, is the place where I keep my 4 bikes: i have two city bikes for me and my wife, my Cannondale CAADX105, and my GIANT Reign. Therefore it’s a place where I keep something around 15 k between the bikes and the tools and machines I own. All of this is “protected” by just a steel door and nothing else. Unfortunately I am afraid my friend Frenk is not the first and will not be the last one and I’d rather not be one of them.

Long story short, I decided to make my own (cheap), security system. It will be engaged or disengaged by using an RFID badge (purchased on Amazon, here), it will have a keypad (bought on Amazon, here), a LCD 16×2 display (Amazon, link) it will be based on a Arduino Mega board (Amazon link) and will be connected to an external alarm from Bentel (link here). I want to use a PIR motion sensor and probably I will setup a magnetic switch on the door too.

For those of you guys that are interested in doing a project like mine I am writing a simple review of this Security Alarm, here. Hope you’ll find it interesting.

I decided to use an Arduino Mega in order to be free to add more sensors or external boards in the future. For example I am planning to add a GSM board to send and receive messages to my phone in case of problems but I will live this part for the (near) future.

So now it is just a matter of waiting the missing parts from Amazon and see if what I have in mind will work or not. Meanwhile I am designing and printing the parts I will need to setup the system in my workshop. The first one is the PIR sensor holder for which I wrote an article today, you can find it here.

Wish me luck.

Cheers

Max