Personal GPS tracking?

**EricE** · 03-09-2007, 03:47 PM

- delete this - I found what I was looking for.
Internet dection

Given that this is down for a while and I don’t need anything fancy, has anyone done any work around a personal tracker?
What I am thinking of is just a simple utility that will grab open hotspots and connect when it can. If connected it would try an upload a text file with your current Lat/Long to a personal FTP space.

Has anyone ever built anything like that? I don't want to re-invent the wheel if it is already done.

**justintime** · 07-08-2007, 11:47 PM

EricE:

I found that cool utility too... but how exactly are you using it to send out Lat/Long info? Are you FTP'ing the data to your server ? Where are you taking the Text file from?

Thanks!

**blazinlow** · 07-09-2007, 02:06 AM

I have created my own GPS app. I dont use it anymore (no more wireless card) but it worked like this

1. A small program I wrote in VB takes the data coming into the COM port from the GPS receiver.

2. It parses the latitude/longitude from the NMEA string

3. Uploads via to my home computer via mySQL, putting the coordinates into a database every x seconds

4. Wrote a webpage using Google Maps to display my location, AJAX updates the page every few seconds with an updated map.

But again, there are already sites that do the same thing. i was just bored one day

**Toxic0n** · 11-16-2007, 06:38 PM

Originally Posted by blazinlow

I have created my own GPS app. I dont use it anymore (no more wireless card) but it worked like this

1. A small program I wrote in VB takes the data coming into the COM port from the GPS receiver.

2. It parses the latitude/longitude from the NMEA string

3. Uploads via to my home computer via mySQL, putting the coordinates into a database every x seconds

4. Wrote a webpage using Google Maps to display my location, AJAX updates the page every few seconds with an updated map.

But again, there are already sites that do the same thing. i was just bored one day

Care to share the source code? This is exactly what I'm looking for

**blazinlow** · 11-17-2007, 01:09 AM

Originally Posted by Toxic0n

Care to share the source code? This is exactly what I'm looking for

Sure, I have to find the source files for the VB program, but here's the php code for the web page

Im not a professional coder, so Im sure my programming could be better, but it works - and sorry, I have a bad habit of not documenting my code

main index page (display's the animated map)

Code:

<?php

mysql_connect($hostname,$username,'$password');
mysql_select_db($dbname);

// Get last record from Database
$sql = "SELECT * from coords";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
$r = (mysql_num_rows($result)-1);  


$sql2 = "select * from coords limit ".$r.",1";
$result2 = mysql_query($sql2);
while ($row=mysql_fetch_array($result2)) {

//Parse NMEA string into seperate longitude and latitude
$coords = explode(",", $row[0]);

$lat1 = substr($coords[3],0,2);
$lat2 = substr($coords[3],-7)/60;
$lat3 = $lat1+$lat2;

$long1 = substr($coords[5],0,3);
$long2 = substr($coords[5],-7)/60;
$long3 = $long1+$long2;

if ($coords[6] == 'W') {
	$long3 = $long3*-1;
}

}



  function str_split($str,$length = 1) {
   if ($length < 1) return false;
   $strlen = strlen($str);
   $ret = array();
   for ($i = 0; $i < $strlen; $i += $length) {
     $ret[] = substr($str,$i,$length);
   }
   return $ret;
  }


$time = str_split($coords[1], 2);

?>


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>Google Maps JavaScript API Example</title>
    <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2&amp;key=ABQIAAAAqBZX38XlcwV2y-uXhUJ8LxTtF6vd6avXdzWhMPo0xyC3DWmL5BSoa6LanAhLDdQtPZeVzWiCzFTWLg"
            type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    //<![CDATA[



    function load() {
      if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
        var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));

	map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());


        map.setCenter(new GLatLng(<?php echo $lat3 ?>, <?php echo $long3 ?>), 20);

var icon = new GIcon();
// image location is a png file used to display the vehicle, in my case I used a pic of my truck

icon.image = "$image location";
icon.iconSize = new GSize(24, 40);
icon.iconAnchor = new GPoint(12, 40);
icon.infoWindowAnchor = new GPoint(5, 1);

      
 var point = new GLatLng(<?php echo $lat3 ?>, <?php echo $long3 ?>);
       map.addOverlay(new GMarker(point, icon));


      }
    }

    //]]>
    </script>
  </head>
  <body onload="load()" onunload="GUnload()">
    <div id="map" style="width: 500px; height: 300px"></div>
<font face = "Arial" size = "2"><b>Map Last Updated <?php echo $time[0].':'.$time[1].':'.$time[2] ?></font>
  </body>
</html>

**blazinlow** · 11-17-2007, 01:51 AM

and here's the actual VB form that runs on the carputer, compile it to an .exe and you're all set...you gotta mess around with MSCOMM32.OCX - to be honest I forget, but google has tons of info - shouldnt be too hard.

http://www.filecrunch.com/file/~cmkvfo

I dont have the structure for the gps table, but it looks for a database called gps

the table is coords

you can figure it out in the code

**Toxic0n** · 11-18-2007, 02:22 PM

That looks great, thanks!

**[H]Bugster** · 01-10-2008, 04:13 PM

this is old, i know. But blazinlow, thanks for the code above. This is what im looking for...maybe i can try and expand on what you've done so far and upload more than just coordinates....perhaps speed, time...etc as well. Thanks again. Gonna test this out now..