We are a small startup company in San Francisco developing our own
vehicle location service. We need to buy or build a consumer device which can send specialized low-level GPS data to us via GPRS or some other US based cell protocol.
We’re looking for any advice you may have about getting started with a
hardware project like this.
Are there GPRS / GPS / microcontroller combo boards that we could just reprogram?
Barring that, can anyone recommend a hardware contractor with experience designing devices to run on a carrier network?
I have worked in the automatic vehicle location (AVL) and tracking, and MIS systems for fleet management.
I hope your small company has a good business model. There’s a glut of small AVL box makers and a glut of AVL service providers.
Qualcomm’s OmniTracs dominates long-haul trucking. Trimble’s acquisition of @Road, a large AVL service provider is noteworthy.
I suppose if you find a very, very specific niche to fill, like right-hand-drive shuttle buses at Airports in cities of less than 10,000 people, you can make a go of it!!
I was the principal engineer on a 14,000 vehicle one-customer project, and other small ones.
You can buy a tracking device from many companies, no need to develop one. You program it for report-by-exception. But you also have to negotiate M2M telemetry rates with one of the carriers. Standard $40/mo or more consumer rates won’t fly. They don’t like AVL on their networks. Low revenue. T-Mobile was most AVL-friendly but their coverage is poor. Verizon 1XRTT is the least. Sprint cannot find the bathroom. AT&T is, well, AT&T. Don’t use GPRS; it’s at end of life and you have to deal with “them”.
Nextel is going away, so beware them.
Trimble/@Road will wholesale you Data-Direct service and sell you AVL boxes for several carriers. If that’s compatible with your scenario from a customer-facing viewpoint.
I have had good luck with the Telit GM862 module. It sounds like what you are looking for: a full GSM cell phone and GPS in a 2" X 2" X 1/4" module. Just insert a SIM, connect antennas, and add power and you have a self contained tracking module. I was able to write a script in Python for the on board interpreter that would get a fix every 10 seconds and send it to my server using UDP packets over GPRS.
As for a data plan I bought a AT&T GoPhone SIM for $25 that is good for 90 days.