Tracking a Mobile Device

Tracking a Mobile Device

The above link will take you to a copy of the tutorial sheet I've written for my 11 to 13-year-old students to Track a Mobile Device in their After-School IoT Club.
Hope you find it useful.

Regards from David.

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Thats great that someone shares projects and tutorials to help others, Thanks a lot Dave.

In my care regarding owntracks I have tested in the past with node red and finally removed as was draining too much battery from the phones.

Regards

Hi Dave,

A cool project.

Just out of interest.
How is the OwnTracks app performing.
On what device (android / ios) did you test it ?
Does it drain the battery ?
It is stable (or does it need to be restarted from time to time) ?

kr
Jan.

In my case tested on 3 android different devices, owntracks was performing well, however for me the problem was the battery drain on all the devices....

I guess will depend on the application you wanted to use it for, for instance if you have a float of company cars for some delivery service so must of the time phone will be plugged to power charger, then could be great, in my case I was using it to enable/disable automatically home alarm if family was on the are or even to share the location. For this second purpose I already have Gmaps shared location which works already great and for the first point... the drain of battery was not justifying the purpose.

Regards

Have a look at Telegram too David, it can also send location and is very secure. I haven't done any flows yet but it's on the plan!
Garry

Hi guys,
Yes - Owntracks has been very stable BUT... eats up my cellphone battery.
I wrote the flow as an experiment to checkout database opeartion using MySQL and WorldMap - both are excellent NR nodes.

Yes - I've used Telegram for my home security system. Very easy to get up-and-running and great if you want to "talk" to devices outside your home network.

Thanks for all your comments.

Yes, it is a feature added from ver 4.4. However, you will have to activate it manually once every 8 hour so not really convenient in the long run. Most likely it will stress your battery the same, there is no other magic way to communicate frequently since the apps access to the network(s) is decided entirely by the phones os

Walter,
it should be possible to ask the phone for it's location from node-red somehow. Something I want to do myself, but still a project for the future.
Garry