@Boots in Action and
@mikerezny and maybe even more
@chartrock might get some entertainment from this.
Some time back I won a a couple of $1000 worth of gear in some online competition. Among the gear was satellite tracker which I was torn between the car and the van. The tracker is limited to cell phone network, but at around $300 is a little better than the eBay stuff. It has geo-fencing which I think is mandatory, so thats a plus. Anyways what to do with it.
Like most folk we have a few old mobile phones so I got to thinking ..... I grabbed one of the old mobiles, used a couple of free Apps, then wrote some code to fill in the gaps and missing functionality .... and shazzam.
The phone is now a geo-fenced based satellite live tracker ready to be put to work. When device (hidden in the car or van) leaves the geo-fence, a gps tracker immediately starts live tracking and records continuously to the device. A txt msg is then sent to my own mobile phone, the msg is intercepted by a another simple App I wrote which lights up the phone like a Xmas tree, and screams the house down. The msg gives me the current location, direction of travel, speed and accuracy of the van or car. If the coppers get involved and take over monitoring the pings, the tracker/phone still secretly sends the same data to me (giving me the opportunity to get there first). I can also call the tracker/phone and silently listen in on the goings on in the car. Bonus is the tracker/phone is battery optimised, so if they kill the power it will still work long enough for me to ......
aSsisT tHe pOlicE
My home made tracker will go in the van at this point even though its performs better than the $300 package, because modifying the geo-fence is a little hands on at this stage of development and the van doesn't move as much as the car, nor really need geo-fencing away from the factory. It will still track despite not adjusting the geo-fence, and it will continue to track outside cell range. At some point the intention is to write some code to send adjusted geo-fence data to the device remotely .... but they day may never come
Isolation can be productive
