HIDEN.org

… with Open Source Tools.

There are a lot of companies around that offer GPS car logging solutions. But if you take a closer look on what they offer then you find out that they are not really flexible when you have non standard needs.

The following describes a work in progress. Basically it works as intended but it still has to prove it’s long time stability.

Hardware

In the cars we have installed a HTC Tattoo mobile phone without SIM card. The phone is placed somewhere behind the dashboard and connected to a 12V jack with as 5V USB plug. The 12V jack is connected to constant power.

The reason that we’ve chosen the HTC Tattoo is because they run Android and are quite cheap.

Phone Software

On the phone we are running a customized version of “GPSLogger for Android” and swiftp . GPSLogger constantly collects the GPS positions and stores them into a .gpx file in the SD-Card of the phone.

Swiftp offers a FTP server on the phone that is also accessible through the internet via proxy.

Collecting the data

Actually there a 2 ways on how to move the .gpx files to the webserver. Pushing from the phone or pulling by the server. We decided to pull the data from the server by a few simple ftp commands.

Displaying the data

In the first round we simply display the collected data by running GPX Viewer. In the second step we will add some filtering functionality. For example we want to be able to extract data based on a timeframe, compare 2 cars and so on. Therefore we’ll probably place a Open-jACOB software in between.