manfredj:
Hi Everybody!
At the moment, I'm making a website for a sailing school in Sweden, who have three large wooden ships. One of the things we have discussed is tracking the ships and showing the results. I think an Arduino could be used for this but it's quite complex. This is some sort of a plan and I'm wondering if it is feasible/realistic. I only got an Arduino a short time ago so I'm still relatively new, so I'm not quite sure how all the hardware works 
Hardware:
*3 Arduino with GPRS and GPS [One for each ship]
*1 Arduino with GPRS and internet [For the SMS to Data logging part, at someone's house who has internet]
Software:
*Every 30/60 minutes, the Arduino reads the GPS coordinates.
*Message is put into a specific format. If phone reception exists, send the SMS message. Else, queue and send later.
*The message is sent by phone to another Arduino with a GSM shield and ethernet shield.
*This one sends it to a data logging website, which can then be used for the sailing school website.
I'm using SMS because it seems like a reliable way to get the message wherever the ships are in Scandinavia, and should have 35 km reception from the transmitter, and the boats seldom sail more than a few hours outside good view of the coast and come into harbor most evenings. I thought about mounting the 'package' 20 meters up in the mast in a watertight container.
Does anybody think this could be done? Could it be reliable? Any feedback is greatly appreciated
It sounds about right - it should be doable; reliability will be dependent on the power source, environmental factors (seal the box good!), and signal availability.
I worked for a company who developed software for a similar system; the devices we coded the back-end for (db for acquisition of tracking data) use a GPS module tied to a satellite phone module (Iridium). They basically reported back the same way (in a configurable manner) - every minute or so, via SMS. We'd get the data as an email message from a gateway (that took the cellular message and passed it back to us as an email - we were tracking a bunch of these things worldwide), and we'd stuff the data into a MySQL DB using Perl.
We could then build maps and such to show movement of the assets (whatever they were). One app we created tied the device to a cellular "pay" phone used on a cruise ship. So - someone would swipe their card, and that would send a message to us; we'd take the card data, verify/authorize it via a payment gateway, then send back a message (yeah, it was 2-way over the satellite!) either accepting or rejecting the card. If it was accepted, it would give them a "fake" dialtone, and they could dial out. If rejected, it would give them a message to that end. At the end of the call, when they hung up, it would send that back to us, and we would compute the time and charges, and apply that to the credit card used via the payment gateway (then update the client's DB with the billing info and such).
So - in short - your system sounds very feasible and possible... Good luck!
