GPS tracker

Hello

I work in an IT company. In our company we develop tracking and diagnostic devices. 

We are going to make a gps tracker for motorcycles. I want your advice to make it better if it is interesting for you to participate in the process of creating a new device.

Main features of the tracker:

- real-time GPS tracking;

- highly-sensetive accelerometer which will notify you of every move of your motorcycle;

- internal battery which charges only when you move, so it won't drain your motorcycle battery;

- route sharing;

- smartphone application;

If the tracker loses a gps/gsm signal you get a notification.

Which other functions would you find useful? What functions do you think are unnecessary?

I will be thankful for any ideas. Feel free to say what you think.

Need to do it for less than 30 quid as that's what I pay for the GPS trackers i have in my vehicles that do most of what you just mentioned.

Hello

I work in an IT company. In our company we develop tracking and diagnostic devices.

We are going to make a gps tracker for motorcycles. I want your advice to make it better if it is interesting for you to participate in the process of creating a new device.

Main features of the tracker:

- real-time GPS tracking;

- highly-sensetive accelerometer which will notify you of every move of your motorcycle;

- internal battery which charges only when you move, so it won't drain your motorcycle battery;

- route sharing;

- smartphone application;

If the tracker loses a gps/gsm signal you get a notification.

Which other functions would you find useful? What functions do you think are unnecessary?

I will be thankful for any ideas. Feel free to say what you think.

Giving your background, you should know there are loads on the market already. The one thing that stopped me getting one in the past is that if you want something decent, there is always an ongoing charge. How about you pay x amount for the product and x amount each time you want to receive any of the info off it.

A nice feature might be top speed, just because if you have a GPS on the bike, its always fun to see what your max speed was

I have no idea what gsm is, but it needs something stronger than GPS. The thing thats put me off the cheapy stuff is that the signal is easily blocked. Park it in an underground car park and the signals gone. Not much use then.

Need to do it for less than 30 quid as that's what I pay for the GPS trackers i have in my vehicles that do most of what you just mentioned.

That made my morning

Need to do it for less than 30 quid as that's what I pay for the GPS trackers i have in my vehicles that do most of what you just mentioned.

 

That made my morning

LOL, i just read that back... haha

But in fairness i'm a professional IT nerd and it's something i've looked into. I bought about 5 different GPS trackers from eBay (all the popular ones), and i've developed an online portal for them all to talk to. It's far from complete, but i use it for my own personal use to plot the routes of my vehicles on Google maps.

My vehicles are in constant contact with my cloud hosted webserver via a GPRS data connection, so after a rideout i can see my route and speeds at various points. its pretty cool in a geeky way.

I did look at starting a tracking business, but I'd need to sell too many units to make it worth my time developing the software, and nobody likes the ongoing costs.

If there was enough interest, i'd gladly supply free test units to anyone who wanted to try it out, but i'd need to make the website look a bit prettier and activate more functionality before releasing it to the public!!

sounds good Joeman. This definitely appeals to my geek. I too am an IT geek and love little projects like this.

free

You've got me interested.

I need to look in to these GPS doo da's myself!

although mobile phones can do it these days as can my sat nav!

although I dont always take my sat nav!!

Well... having a gps link up to a smartphone to use its gps and internet... and hook it into google maps. But I would like to try it out though!

I purchased a couple of units off of ebay and use them with the free site http://gps-trace.com/

They even do an app for android smart phones you can use with their site (not sure about i-pig)

Only drawback with all these systems, although you're not paying a monitoring company, you still need a 2G sim card with data connection for them to work so even the free ones are not free as such.

Be aware of these all cheap devices. Later you will have problems connecting all desired software and installing additional features. I have tested a bunch of software, finally got just gps tracking software from gps vox. A lot of them are not compatible and doesn't work properly.

As a background project I'm slowly building my own GPS monitoring service. I've bought a few Gps trackers from eBay and got my software to work with them just fine.

It nowhere near ready for public use but its working with my own trackers just fine. One day I might even offer it out as a service for people to use.