Preliminary Testers Wanted - GPS Tracker

**RX7FDTT** · 01-18-2005, 03:09 AM

Yes, this is also what I'm more concerned about, sort of a cheap man's LoJack...

Where the Computer on each shutdown, and startup, tries to connect with the GPS unit to get an accurate bearing, waits for a wifi connection to pop up, and sends a SMTP message to the e-mail of your choice, and you'd be able to send it off to a filter e-mail box, yet should you need to say as a parent, or in case the car is stolen, you wait for the e-mail and can at least tell where it last was .....

The reason I think shutdown, and startup, is that its likely that the GPS software has reliquished controll of the Com Port by then.... but com shareing or something to get the whole trip would be sweet... the thing that's important is that once it's completed a trip it uploads it preferably Mapi, or FTP, the issue with FTP is my IP isn't constant for more than a week or two, and my e-mail server is always static.. .

-DC

**n8scstm** · 01-18-2005, 04:06 PM

If you have a dynamic IP check out http://www.no-ip.com
With this you wont connect to your carputers IP, you will connect to your no-ip dns.
So what I'm saying is to run an ftp server on the carputer. Then you actually download the file from your carputer to your desktop when you need it. That way its not constantly uploading to a remote server, hence, less bandwidth. Its very easy to run an ftp server on your own computer. There is a lot of good free software out there.
Another option is to use a reverse connecting trojan and you wont even need a dns. The trojan running on your carputer will atcually connect to your desktop automatically giving you full control over your carputer. Its what hackers use but it has some legitamate uses.

**justintime** · 09-29-2005, 11:13 PM

Is this GPStracker software project dead? I'd love to see a version of this that starts automatically and minimizes to the taskbar.

Thanks!

**Bugbyte** · 09-29-2005, 11:14 PM

Have you checked into GPSsecure?

**justintime** · 09-29-2005, 11:20 PM

Yeah, I looked into it, but it seems to require some web service subscription. I don't feel comfortable having to share my trips with John Doe! ALl I really want is a log file, and I thinkg GPSSecure does more than just that. Will look into it again.

**ukchris** · 09-30-2005, 12:00 AM

Funny, it was pretty much dead but now I finally have a PC in my car I have been thinking about starting up again. Capturing the info is actually pretty easy, getting it in the right format for the sites I wanted to upload to was actually more challenging. I'll try to experiment a little over the next week or two, or if there are any (ideally Delphi) programmers that want to participate I'm more than happy to be an advisor.

**pRoFiT** · 09-30-2005, 12:34 AM

I have delphi, In fact i took two semesters of pascal in college. Which is the same syntax. Basicly turned into a Windows drag and drop style programming language. Almost like VB with pascal code. I'm kind of working on RRskineditor right now but I like to jump from project to project. Post a link to the source. I dont have a GPS yet but its next on my list of carputer items.

Side note: If you had a cell phone or GPRS connected to you computer you could program the software to send the xml file every hour. Who needs wifi to transmit an XML file. Its just a text file. Better yet you could have it send the file every time the carputer shuts down and starts up.

**ukchris** · 09-30-2005, 08:51 AM

A lot of the concepts I was planning were quite straightforward but as a "dabbler" in programming I didn't get through them all. The basic outline I was going for was to build a small tray app that took the GPS signal and wrote it to a log, most likely a GPX format XML file. This would log trips to a file.

Further extensions to this would be to allow you to start/stop a track while travelling (so you weren't forced to track the whole trip), record waypoints (a sinlge click can create a waypoint ina GPX file) and to support more sophisticated uploads.

For uploading the most basic form would be for you to manually copy the files or use a file sync program. I also started looking at initiating a dial-up connection to do scheduled transmissions, my aim was to say every x minutes dial my cell phone GPRS connection, post data then hang up. I experimented with a PHP page to take a specific location from a GET and put it in a database, a similar page could then easily view the last logged location online.

A variation on this theme is to do the same via WiFi but then you need to get in to detecting the network connection as well as legality issues of using other peoples WiFi. It isn't hard to just build a URL string and crank it out every few minutes hoping some will succeed (when you have hit a WiFi point).

I'll dig out what I did, why don't you PM me your email address and I'll send you the details I put together and we can discuss. I'll also email you my IM addresses etc.

Chris.

**tj!2k4** · 09-30-2005, 10:49 AM

If you were to further develop this, the ability to disable/enable logging via command prompt would be a sweet feature.. just a suggestion..

.. and very nice work on what you've done so far!

**ukchris** · 09-30-2005, 10:53 AM

A better programmer than me could probably have a command line program send an instruction to an already running app to start/stop or, maybe an easier alternative, there could be a command line version of the same app - although that doesn't help with stopping logging does it, oops.