Hybrid Cloud GPS Tracking
Hey there nerds!
Thought I would share my latest home automation project. We recently purchased an enclosed trailer for our race promoting business and will be storing it offsite. Not having visibility to high value assets makes me anxious so naturally I wanted to be able to see if it unexpectedly moves.
My brother and I started looking at a wide array of commercial GPS tracking hardware and services. Ultimately I wanted something that was low cost, developer friendly, and with no recurring costs so we ultimately decided on these really clever trackers made by particle.io. They are IP67 rated with cellular, GNSS, wifi, and bluetooth radios. 2000mAh internal battery with charging via USB-C or 6-30VDC. There is a waterproof M8 connector that you can connect a cable with flying leads to integrate into more or less anything imaginable.
Perfect! We have hardware that reports location data to a pretty generic platform. Now what?
Digging through Home Assistant I discovered an add-on for an open source GPS tracking platform called Traccar. After a few days of tinkering I had it setup receiving location info from our Particle trackers via webhooks. All of the data is written to MariaDB and visualized in a very configurable interface.
Home Assistant pulls location data for the tracked devices and I have setup conditional notifications based on geofencing. EG - notify me via push & SMS (using twilio) if the trailer leaves storage and my phone is not with it.
https://github.com/traccar/traccar
https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-traccar
This was a really fun project and useful for anyone who has high value assets like trailers, boats, etc.
Things I learned:
How GIS/GPS data is structured
How to use mustache templating in JSON/webforms to easily extract data
A practical example of how Cisco IoT devices (EG - IR1101) could be used for similar enterprise use cases
Lemme know if you have any questions!
