I have teens...
They drive my car...
They are boys...
I am an engineer...
I like life hacks...
I have an Arduino...
And a GPS logging shield....
Therefore, TrunkTrackerino.
More than two years ago I started a push to get my Arduino working with the GPS logger shield. It failed, mostly because I had some other life pressures. I recently pulled out my Arduino and started messing with it again, not really sure why... And I got the GPS working. And then I thought... I can build a simple device to throw in the trunk that will record driving speed! And thus TrunkTrackerino was born.
There are sketches for using a GPS. There are also sketches for logging GPS data to a card reader. But I really didn't like any of them individually, so I have merged them together. And as of today, I believe I have it working (not entirely sure, since I'm in my hotel and can't pick up signal--I will know more tomorrow).
The goal is to build an Arduino-based device which
* tracks speed and location
* sleeps when there is no motion
* logs nothing when there's no valid data
* stores data on an SD card
* can be imported into XL to view historical speed data
* can be imported into Google Earth for bread crumb data
Eventually this project will end up as the base for the APRS balloon tracking system. For now, it's enough to know my boys are as honest as they say they are.
Update: I took a brief stroll around the hotel entrance today. For some reason, the logging code is logging an empty file. The GPS is working great--when I watch in Arduino's serial monitor, I can see good valid strings which are being parsed great. I'd say I'm 10 lines of code from a working beta.
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