sim808 FONA board is way greater to suit you best, compact and handy, built in charging interface for lion batt, USB interface through which FW can be uploaded
good news is, you don't need an external MCU to run it, you can use the built in one, an ARM , and this might be your start if interested https://simcom.ee/documents/?dir=
actually i am up on the very same project like yours, but for human(kids) , trouble is i am looking out for the cheapest board like 'sim 808 FONA' ( less than 10 USD ) for that will be affordable to my clients , i am done with software part (ie: mysql, android app with features: geofence,real time tracking, panic button,etc )
the current one (HW tracker) that i have is bit messy, cumbersome and bulkier as i put together individual boards in single casing ie: arduino nano, ublox neo gps+antenna, sim 800L+antenna, charging board, lion battery, but it works pretty amazing
Thanks for all the details on that other approach using another board. This is what i had in mlind initially but gave up a bit as I don't have the skills (yet) to implement that from scratch from a board without MCU.
I am however making very nice progress with my Chinese hardware: my Python server is fully working (well, maybe 80-90%), in that it's not causing major crashes anymore and is able to handle most important packets that are sent by the device. If it's a GPS packet, all good. If it's a GSM/WiFi packet, I'm then querying the Gmaps API to get a location from these informations... and it's working remarkably good.
I will try to implement other LBS providers at a later point. I am also planning to refactor completely the code into a nicer version, using mthods/classes instead of just defining functions everywhere... But anyway, that's the joy of prototyping ! i also have a decent UI to visualize the paths, implemented in the R Shiny framework. This is not ideal, but that was MUCh faster for me than to package the Pythons erver into a Flask app that would also have a web UI. That is the long-term goal of thsi project anyway.
Hi @CoinCoin88, I have a question about what you are doing with the ZX612 board. You configured so that instead of sending a message to their server, it will send the message to an "API-Rest" (for example), if so, how you configured it to send a message through a URL instead of to a phone number ?.