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From Bob's Basement

Project Inception: 25th February, 2008

Status: In development

Project Leader: BOfH

1 Introduction
2 Requirements
3 3G
4 GPS
5 Computer
6 Power
7 Implimentation

[edit] Introduction

The idea came to me of tracking a rider in the London to Brighton Bike Ride. The plan involves arming the rider with a small computer, GPS unit and 3G dongle. This will upload location data to a server where we can have fun with it. The initial idea is to upload it to Google maps.

[edit] Requirements

Bike + Rider
3G dongle
Computer
GPS unit
Our good friend, Hopper

[edit] 3G

Internet access has been tried and tested on a Huawei E220 3G dongle.

[edit] GPS

I have a number of GPS units that might fit the bill. One is a Garmin Etrex Venture, the other is an RS232 GPS receiver.

[edit] Computer

The BB Gumstix has been suggested

[edit] Power

TBA

[edit] Implimentation

The plan is to write a daemon for the bike computer which will read the NEMA data from the GPS and send that off to Hopper using a UDP stream over 3G to Hopper. Hopper will run a second daemon which will recieve the data and process it to be displayed as a track on Google Maps and possibly OpenStreetMap.

[edit] wvdial

The 3G dongle is being dialed by wvdial. This is known to work. There is an autoreconnect feature on wvdial. This needs to be tested.

[edit] gps-stream

GPS-Stream is a collection of programs written by BB for the project which interface with a GPS unit on the remote site, and stream NMEA back to hopper and it processed into coordinates and stored in a MySQL database. The remote site is written in C, and the server side is written in Python.

The Python script inserts a new set of coordinates based on the latest and most accurate data over a number of seconds, into a MySQL database. From here, the data may be used by other programs.