GPS
My current GPS location and my movements for the last 12 hours have been plotted on a map here. The map will update every 30 seconds.
Current GPS Location
| Longitude: | -2.1944° |
| Latitude: | 51.78936° |
| Altitude: | 204.4 meters |
| Speed: | 0 mph |
| heading: | 0.0° |
| Last Updated: | 2 months ago |
Google Latitude
| Longitude: | -2.427567° |
| Latitude: | 53.08664° |
| Accuracy: | 27 meters |
| Location: | Crewe, Cheshire, UK |
| Last Updated: | 2 months ago |
Follow current position
How it works
For this version, I have a laptop with a 3G USB adapter and Bluetooth. It is connected to a Tom Tom Wireless GPS Receiver and Vodafone. The laptop is running a piece of software called GpsGate. This takes the input from the GPS receiver and submits it to a URL on this server.
The server takes the submitted data and if the position is different, stores it in a database. The page then displays the current position and any journeys taken in the past 12 hours. An AJAX call is used to update the map and info. The web server is running on Ruby on Rails, with a MySQL database. This is served by Apache and FastCGI.
The aim is to expand this into a full website with many features and multiple users. The software is available for Pocket PC as well as Windows. Hopefully someone will release a version for the 3G iPhone.
September 2009 Update
Google Latitude has come about and sort of made this redundant, but has it? After playing with Latitude I've noticed it doesn't track paths or show historical info. It supports data feeds with JSON, so it would be possible to pull this information on a regular basis (every x seconds or minutes) and then store it to display a track or show history.
The implementation used on this has now changed to a HTC Touch Pro running GPSGate and updating through it's own GPRS/3G/HSDPA connection. It runs either when I manually start it or I use TomTom.