Hardware tracker with Trackserver

  • skroboladam

    (@skroboladam)


    2 years, 2 months ago

    Hi,
    great plugin.
    I’m currently using it in art project for a friend, that in short words is about making a drawing based on GPS locations while walking.
    I’ve modified it a bit so it doesn’t show underlying map but just the black line. It is not always very precise and losing signal, so many glitches appear – but it makes it even more interesting. You can watch it here: https://www.maria-nova.com/prolegomena 😉

    But what I’m looking for right now is a way to change tracking device from smartphone to some simple, readymade hardware solution – like car/pet/band tracker. So the question is – do you know a company/producer (or maybe opensource device?) that gives the ability to set custom server and send data to website with trackserver plugin? Most that I found are closed systems that use servers provided by hardware producer.

    Thank you
    as

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author tinuzz

    (@tinuzz)

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Hi,

    Thank you for using Trackserver.

    Unfortunately, I do not know about any device that can do what you want. I have looked for them in the past, but eventually I gave up. That was a few years ago. At that time, I also wrote this:

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/trackserver/#can%20trackserver%20support%20protocol%20x%20or%20device%20y%3F

    So there may be devices that can report to a custom server, but if they don’t use HTTP as the transport protocol, it still wouldn’t work with Trackserver without any kind of middleware.

    I am still interested in this topic, so if you manage to find an affordable device that can do this, please let me know!

    Best regards,
    Martijn.

    P.S. on a side note, you said you’ve modified Trackserver so it doesn’t show the underlying map, but I noticed that it still fetches map tiles from openstreetmap.org. It just doesn’t show them. I don’t know what you changed, of course, but wouldn’t it be easier to just change the tile server URL setting to point to a PNG of a white square? That way, no changes in Trackserver are necessary, and no map tiles would need to be fetched at all.

    Plugin Author tinuzz

    (@tinuzz)

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Maybe this helps:

    There is a system called Traccar, which supports hundreds of different GPS trackers, both software and hardware based.

    Their list of supported devices is here: https://www.traccar.org/devices/

    Presumably, all of these have the option to use a custom server, because Traccar is also meant to be self-hosted. If any of the hardware-based ones use HTTP for transport, I cannot tell you, unfortunately.

    Martijn.

    Thread Starter skroboladam

    (@skroboladam)

    2 years, 2 months ago

    Thank you,
    I just found one device – teltonika GH4000 – and in advanced user manual there is detailed description. It can send data through GPRS to server address (IP or DNS address), port number, TCP/IP or UDP. It can even store data when no available connection. Yeah, a lot of config options… Looks very promising. I think that there would be more devices capable of doing this.

    There is one more thing I would like to ask you – I want to show few points (markers/pins) on the map and make them interactive (eg. click and move map to other location, show modal with html or just link to some anchor on the same page or url). I’ve noticed that showing markers is possible with gpx file, but any idea how to add any of functions mentioned above to the marker? Some not-very-complicated way to placing additional elements (html) on the map would be awesome.

    P.s. Thank you for suggestion on hiding map. I’ve done it with simple css, so didn’t really changed plugin code. Your solution looks better. And thank you very very very 😉 much for the Single request mode! It allows me to finally show much more data on the map.

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by skroboladam.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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