I've purchased a Mega 2560, Wi-Fi shield and GPS shield with magnetic antenna and screen. I plan on making a compact, vehicle powered GPS tracker that logs to a text file on a Micro SD holder i have on either the GPS or WiFi shield and having that logged data automatically dump to the server when the vehicle returns. I'm curious to hear any advice or ideas on feasibility and design. Thank you for your time.
I plan on taking the RAW NMEA data and using it in Google via a Visual Basic program...
and having that logged data automatically dump to the server when the vehicle returns.
Returns where?
I'm curious to hear any advice or ideas on feasibility and design.
It's possibly feasible, depending on what "when the vehicle returns" means.
Wouldn't a regular GPS with maps and directions and all that stuff work just as well? mine records data for all trips up to a week. Connect the GPS to the computer and download the data. Perhaps not quite as convenient, but the device in the vehicle is more capable. Unless the idea is to track the car without the driver knowing that it is being tracker.
I'm building this for a customer that doesn't want to ever have to touch the device once it's installed in the vehicle.
The device tracks the vehicle's daily movements by NMEA tracks saved to the SD card and upon returning to base, connects to the companies WiFi and dumps the data to a specific location on the companies server that my program will interface with and create a KMZ of.
Any advice?
This may be out in left field, and apologies if so, but I have been wondering whether these Wi-Fi enabled SD cards would be a possible solution for applications like yours:
It looks like an SD card but has a Wi-Fi interface that can be configured to automatically upload everything on the card via wi-fi when it comes in range of a known access point.
-br
I totally thought of this Eye-Fi SD card. I reckon the problem would be distance. The yard for the vehicles is 500+ feet away from the nearest possible antennae location. Thanks for the thought though.
I am looking for this same application. Did you find a suitable way to do this? In looking at the Eye-Fi it appears to only transfer .jpg and .raw files. A lot of people are trying to get it to use .txt files but aren't having much luck. Any other way of accomplishing this task?