Dude where's my car?

Inspiration

We made this at a hardware hackathon, as a product of brainstorming. (https://www.hackster.io/hackathons/hardware-weekend/new-york-city/projects). We realized it would be a good idea to know where your car is for various reasons: forgetting where you parked, lending your car out to a friend, towed away, or maybe someone GTA'd your car...

How it works

A device is placed in your car and sends up GPS coordinates to a cloud server every few seconds, or if your car has moved a significant distance. It will keep that data persistent on the server so that it can be loaded by another medium (Google maps). The front-end of this project is just a website with Google Maps and a "pin" of where the device last sent it's data from. This device is powered by the car's 5V cigarette socket and it will charge a battery when the car is on, and the device will continue to run when the car is off.

Challenges I ran into

Setting up the Linkit platform was a little tricky.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Live updating Google maps and seeing the device hooked up is pretty cool.

What I learned

I learned how to use GPS, GSM and GPRS with the Mediatek Linkit hardware. I also learned about Microsoft Azure services.

What's next for Dude where's my car?

Telemetry data (mileage, average speed, etc). Include secondary-battery support for when the car is off (in case it gets towed or stolen). Change the connection medium to low-level GSM (using a service like Thingconnect, for example) because it's more reliable and more cost-effective than GPRS.

Built With

• arduino
• azure
• google-maps
• jade
• javascript
• linkit
• mongodb
• node.js
• thingconnect