Open Source Tracking Platform – DhruvTracker
In every few days I am getting constant news from TV, internet and newspapers that some or the other group has developed a vehicle tracking system which can track vehicles online using GPS and GSM. From a year or so I also had a thought to build a tracking device but I was not able to build it at that time. Few days back I had a need to put a tracking device in my car for surveillance purpose so instead of buying one I thought to build one and now since there are lots of people working on this so I have started to build an open source tracking platform which will help other individuals and developers to build their own tracking system.
I have started a blog for this www.dhruvtracker.com and will document the entire process with full hardware design and software sources which will be used to build the tracking device and the backend system. Initially I’ll build a web based tracking system and later on I’ll build mobile application for accessing the same.
I’ll be using the following tools:
Hardware Design:
- Eagle CAD – PCB layout and schematic
- MPLAB C – Firmware (Bootloader & Application) & Simulation
- Proteus ISIS – Simulation
Software:
- PHP5 & Mysql – Backend web application
- HTML5 Boilerplate & Smarty – Frontend web application
Instead of making a standalone application for on demand tracking where application communicates with tracking device only when user wants to get its location, I am going to make a web based application because it will log 24×7 the tracking device providing a log for past time with an added advantage that a web application can be accessed from anywhere in the world without the need of any special software program. Secondly some of the GSM providers in India do not allow incoming data access, like if I am connected to Data/GPRS from a mobile device and if I open a FTP port on this mobile device then also I will not be able to access the FTP port from any remote computer. But if this mobile device wants to send any information it can send to any remote computer, kind of one way communication.
From now on I’ll be posting all the information on DhruvTracker blog.