GPS Tracking via SMS

I planned this way back when I was messing with GPS and SMS stuff before, but now I’ve actually done it. Kinda showed myself up a little, though, I wrote it (mostly) from scratch and it took me a matter of hours. Last time I tried to base it on other GPS/GSM modem code I’d written and it failed miserably – all hail threads.

Basically what this app does is tracks a laptop (currently, I *may* port it to a phone or two, if I learn how) and sends the co-ordinates to you via SMS upon request. Simple, really. The code is almost release-worthy, actually, so this time I just might drop a RAR for people to mess with. Needs a little tidying up and some better commenting, but it seems like something which might be useful, I dunno.

I did have an idea, though, while writing this. I thought about how to interpret the latitude and longitude and how to turn that into a street name or local landmark, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to do that. Next I considered I’d need some kind of database or map… or map, that was it, why not somehow pump the co-ordinates into TomTom or some other GPS app for realtime tracking? I already know how to simulate a GPS unit, right? There are several issues/points to this, but I’ll try to run through them quickly…

1) Handheld realtime tracking would be like, totally excellent, dude. Phone, perhaps?
How to get the data in, though? Via SMS is too slow and expensive so a data connection would be preferable. I think a GPS simulator with the ability to feed data in through TCP would be a good start, though I don’t do any Windows Mobile stuff (the only platform I have a real device for) yet. More than possible, though, if you throw in a virtual serial cable too.

2) How to get the data from the tracker?
Well, at present the app only spits out data via SMS, but again I think mobile data would work (for low resolution tracking, it doesn’t have to be super fast/low latency).
Maybe costly, though, and signal issues may crop up depending on where the tracker ends up.

3) This is a Windows app.
Right now, it’s a Windows app. Yes, desktop Windows. The kind which usually runs on a laptop which has a battery life of about 3 hours and is about as inconspicuous as an elephant shaped tank firing luminous paintballs from its metallic trunk. Could be crammed into a portable device, though, as long as it has a GSM modem (or HSDPA modem, better for data) and GPS of some description. Would need retooling for Windows Mobile (and certainly for any Linux platform – I may or may not ever get around to learning Python, we shall see).

4) I lost my train of thought, but I think I covered everything.

That’s about that for now, hopefully I can clean up the code and dump it somewhere for folks to play with. My track record here is not spectacular, so don’t get your hopes up, but we shall see.