Comments on: Track anything for $40?

By: Rich

Rich — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:13:42 +0000

I too am interested in tracking something inexpensively. I have someone harrassing my daughter and she got a restraining order but the guy still trashes her things and there is no proof he was at her place. Can someone help me with a suggestion of what I can put under his car to track his cars whereabouts. It needs to have long battery life to throw a signal but doesn’t need all the extra things like car speed, recorded history, etc

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:42:09 +0000

I am sure you could snag an old android phone off craigslist for a decent price along with a car charger you could hardwire to a 12v source with an inline fuse. Then for the gps tracking portion there are some open source projects you could have adapted to your needs using a hire-a-coder type site or scour your local meetup groups. Sending a text message may be difficult without someone there to press the send button though it may still be do-able. You might be better off with having it update a database with its current location and a timestamp, even battery charge level if it will be running on battery power.

If you will be recovering the device you could use an app like mytracks, which is made by Google. Set it to only ping the gps once every 2 minutes or so and you could save some battery life. It is a pretty well made app, but again you’d have to recover the device to pull the information.

Sadly I don’t see a time stamp on your post so I cannot see how old it is to take a guess at whether this is still something you are wanting to do.

By: شات كتابي

شات كتابي — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:20:05 +0000

thnks
goooooooooooood
min:)

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:19:28 +0000

I tried a couple of the tracking solutions mentioned in this thread (Mologogo and MyTracking). Forget Mologogo…very unstable and LOTS of reboots. MyTracking is actualy very good: super stable, free, and nice map page with geofences and stuff:
http://www.geocities.com/prestonsystems/mytracking

It was free but you need to email the developer for an account (a bit of a pain). The amazing thing is the cost. Boost Mobile i425 costs $30 at Target and the only recurring cost is $10 every 3 months to keep the account alive.

By: alain

alain — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:12:02 +0000

Aza,

The problem is neither the hardware nor the phone. The issue is the network. So the nifty app may work for one but not scale. Networks have a fair use limit which prevents anyone for making too many requests on their network. That means sms, phone calls etc. Operators will shut you down if you bypass their estimated top user range. Sad but it was necessary to prevent fraud. A number of clever people had found real cheap ways to call in the past…

By: Kai Hendry

Kai Hendry — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:15:50 +0000

New-ish Japanese phones offer a service like imadoco for a couple of dollars a month to track stuff.

By: Daniel Einspanjer

Daniel Einspanjer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:39:54 +0000

A while back, I wanted something that I could put on our cat to track it when it went outside and my wife’s keys, and also attach to my child “just in case” when we were at the mall or a playground. I quote just in case because I tend to focus on playing with my child rather than just turning her loose, but still. :)

Anyway, I came across loc8tor.com which made little watch battery powered short/medium range directional tracking tags. This was exactly what I wanted. They can even be put into an active tracking mode that will alert the hand held tracker if the tag goes outside a predefined range.

The company has since come out with a slicker version for $80. http://www.loc8tor.com/product_information.asp?pid=96&cid=18

I just mention it because it is slightly correlated. I know it is no cellular radio with GPS, and it is also double the price range you are talking about. Still, one more interesting piece of tech and it works quite well. Just make sure that you attach it to your cat’s collar in such a way that the cat can’t dip it in her water bowl on a regular basis. :)

By: Joel "Jaykul" Bennett

Joel "Jaykul" Bennett — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:17:59 +0000

You can get a GPS-enabled Boost (prepay) Motorola i425t from BestBuy for $30 (including a $5 credit) http://bit.ly/1Rgqcd and use Mogologo (mentioned above) or a free trial account of this stuff http://www.geocities.com/prestonsystems/mytracking

The GPS in these isn’t that great, but I think you’ll get a location way more often than every 30 minutes ;-)

By: Justin Dolske

Justin Dolske — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:10:51 +0000

Sparkfun sells a few relevant items…

* A mostly complete system, but costs $450 ($360 if you buy more than 100! :-) — http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8289

* A barebones board for $150 (GPS, cell, battey not included).

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:57:06 +0000

If you have a S60 Nokia phone, you can install software that will track your position and share it. Have a look at Nokia’s “Mobile Web Server” (basically Apache running on your phone), which you can write plugins in Python for. Also, Nokia’s Sports Tracker can track your position over time and share it with friends online.

I doubt you’ll get a contract-free phone with GPS for less than $150 for a couple of years though.

Another thing to note: turning a cell on and off every 30 minutes will probably use more power than leaving it on in standby all the time.