How to Make a Countryside Gps Tracker

Hi!

We are three students from Univesity of Vic and we are Mechatronics Engineering students and this project is from Embedded Systems subject.

This project, as its name says, it's about building a tracker to use in countryside places where helpfully we only have gsm and gprs mobile coverage. In the begining of the project, we tryied to make it using wifi technology but we changed our mind as we saw that we would need to install wifi antennas to be able to track, therefore, the project would get unfeasible and we went for a different technology, gsm and gprs(2G).

There are different devices that we can use to do it. Adafruit has done a project FONA 808, this project combines gsm,gprs and gps and they have made a lot of documentation and software about it. They are really good!

In our case, we have choosen a kind of copy (SIM808 Breakout Board) that combines gsm, gprs, gps and bluetooth (bluetooth has not been used in our project).

All the needed documentation for our project has been taken from Adafriut examples, documentation that we will find in the next link: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-fona-808-cell... and the attached files in this instructable.

Necessary hardware:

-Arduino Uno board

-SIM808 Breakout Board GSM & GPS & Bluetooth

-18650 li-ion batery pack 2A (You can find it in amazon)

In the attached video we explain what are the most important facts to take in account to make it.

Step 1: Connecting Devices

In this step we will show how to connect properly all the devices

As explained in the attached video, it is very important to have a good batery as well as interconnect the ground cable on both devices to get the same reference voltage. We need to do it this way because we need to comunicate arduino and sim808 module via UART. Otherwise it will NEVER work

Step 2: Arduino Software

Once we have assembled all necessary parts of the gps tracker, we will need a software to comunicate with SIM808 device via At commands.

In our case, with the following software, we will only ask via AT commands for longitude, latitude, time and date.

Step 3: Setting Up a Database and Arduino Software

After loading the file in the Arduino Uno, the target of the project is being able to read the sent data from any device.

To be able to do it, we need to upload the data to some kind of server on the internet.

We have choosen https://data.sparkfun.com as we can get a free server very easily, it is very easy to set up, and it is very intuitive to use.

In it, we will create a small database with only 4 columns:

-Latitude, Longitude, Time and Date.

In the end it will give us the resulting Public url, Public key, Private keyand so on.

You will need Public url + Public key + Private key + APN to be able to configure your arduino software.

Be careful with APN as it depends on the sim card company, in our case, in Spain we use Movistar Company.

Step 4: Ending Up

This project has been used for a university purpose and the software used in it has been taken from another instructable called https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-Mob...

This software has been parcially adapted to our project as we take the data from a gps triangulation instead of gsm triangulation and we have tried to get a bit less of bugs adapting it. This software remains a bit unstable.