car tracking

sundula

Does anyone know anything about on-line tracking of company cars or cheap ways to do it?

TCP/IP

I know both O2 and vodafone provide this service give them a call

garthv

I bumped into a chap in the local a few weeks ago who owned a company that installed gadgets like this into cars. All he had to do was send a text to a certain number and it replied with the exact location,speed and distance away of the car.
Pretty nifty , If I see him again ill ask him what the name of his company is.

/edit
Did a quick google and found this :
http://www.carsounds.ie/sat/

Rew

There are loads of companies doing it. How cheap it is is another thing altogether. Make sure you know what you want. Fleet Tracking and Car Tracking are 2 diferent things. If its just your own car and you want it for security purposes there are specfic packages. Fleet tracking lets you see hwere your cars/trucks are in real time and there are loads of stats constatly collected. There is a cost accoicated with the constant data.

A very cheap solution is to put a GPS that logs internally in to the car then download its contents every day or what ever.

I wrote a app that hooks a GPS to a PDAand logs to a DB via GPRS. You can set the update rate to anything you like. Have logs of various trips around the place. The big problem is the front end. Representing GPS tracks on maps is a nightmare. Maps are impossible to get (unnless you want to give your first born to the OS guys in the park) and decent software is hard to come by.

Im finishing a masters degree in Location detection and information managment BTW hence the codeing etc.

Pataman

Have a look at http://www.mstinternational.com/ Thinking about it for my bike but i am sure it will work on any 12 volt application.

towbar

Rew,

Have you found any decent digital maps? I've started writing an app that allows me to scan maps but its painfully tedious process and cant be distributed.

Rew

Only the OS maps but iv only seen them as tiff's. The have vector versions available though. Problem is to use them costs far too much.

The tiffs can be converted to geotiffs but its a horrible process of identifying points on the map and give their Long/Lat. OS can supply them as geotiffs I hear. The app I wote to log the GPS stuff over GPRS is pretty useless ATM as iv no way to represent the data.

Iv a load of ideas for using GPS+PC in a car with a touch screen but again without maos theres not much point.

S2000

Hi all,

We have been working hard on getting a new venture up and running that will help us all protect our pride and joy motors. As of today, car trackers in Ireland have just become affordable!! Have a look at

http://www.CarWatch.ie

for the full range of trackers, garage and home alarms, CCTV equipment and even some in-car multi media. We have many more products on the way shortly and will keep you posted on all developments. There are support forums on the site so if you have any questions or opinions please send them there and we will try our best to answer them.

Basically this is a unit you install into a vehicle (hidden). You get free client software you can install on your desktop or laptop... you ring the unit (which will have an 086 or 087 number) and the unit then sends back it's location, speed and heading to the client mapping software so you can instantly see it on a map. Loads of other features too.

Best value by far on the Irish market today.

I fitted a tracker unit to my car recently and it really is the business. Street level mapping of major Irish towns and all national roads!

Let me know if you need more info,

Adrian