GPS tracker with RF link

[ejo60]

The idea is to take the adafruit GPS board and to read it out with the moteino, it then works as a tracker. Draws 50 mA from a 800 mAh of battery, so it could run for 16 hours, furthermore I use the flash on the moteino, 4 Mbit of memory or 500 kB is enough to store some 6000 records which I log every 10 seconds from the GPS receiver.

Since I don't like cables the GPS data is retrieved by remove control from a gateway which is part of a home automation system, the gateway transceiver records events from two motion detectors, a water level meter in the basement, it carries a real time clock and a pressure chip. Also light levels and temperatures are recorded at the gateway and in the basement.

Some photos are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vvkn8txo1t0icob/AABeSscZTcGcHH5Lh5cI6zmVa/GPS%20tracker

It took me a while to get the flash memory to work the way I wanted it, so I build a class called logger that allows you to store strings in flash as if it were a system log file. By remote control from the gateway I retrieve the log from the GPS RFM device, so that it effectively functions as a wireless GPS tracker. Could be useful as a car or truck registration system, or maybe you had other applications in mind.

[Felix]

Very cool, my congrats!
You should enter in the hackaday prize contest!

[jackbrouno]

Never saw this concept before, nice idea

[ejo60]

Some people have asked me for more details on this project, which was now field tested for about a half year. I'm completely happy with what it does, more details are now on my blog, it includes code for the moteino board and the matlab script to generate a kml file for Google Earth. The gateway is not very complicated, you have to instruct it to send text strings that the GPS tracker understands.

http://ejo60.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/diy-wireless-gps-tracker/

If you haven't got matlab then maybe consider octavia under linux, or maybe someone should re-code it to C++?