I had put the Car GPS Tracking project on hold for a while since I had a new group project I was devoting all my time on: Kwartzlab — Kitchener/Waterloo’s epic new Hackerspace . We opened the doors on October 1st and have been running at warp speed ever since! If you’re in the area, you oughtta make it out to one of our Tuesday Open Nights to check us out!

Now, as far as the Libelium GPRS shield goes, not long after that post I actually switched to a new module .. the anniversary of my stolen vehicles was approaching fast and I didn’t want to get caught without being able to engage the ejection seats via SMS (hmm, do those void the terms of a lease?). Anyhow, the module I ended up using is the GSM Playground from HW Kitchen. It’s similar to the Libelium shield but has some additional nifty features such as having a built-in microphone, amp (to connect a loudspeaker), and the ability to receive and send SMS messages reliably (yay!). It’s also got a rudimentary objected-oriented library available for communication right out of the box. Now with that project on the go, I plan to go back to the Libelium shield and complete the library I was working on for that.

Aside from the now working SMS component, I’ve recently hit another hurdle — the GPS unit. So far I’ve been using an antiquated serial GPS called the Delorme Tripmate, (which was modded into a standard NMEA receiver). While relatively large (pre-modded version required four AA batteries), it worked well enough and happened to come enclosed in a waterproof case that could fit the Arduino and GSM shield in as well. Problem is, the thing died on me recently so I’ve been looking for a suitable alternative. I could hook up a USB-based receiver but I’ve been considering stacking a GPS shield of some sort to keep things nice and compact. Stay tuned!

Fast forward a couple weeks of tinkering with LEDs and buzzers and I picked up an awesome shield to work with, a GPRS module from Libelium:

This baby allows the Arduino to communicate with our mediocre GPS network up here. Not only can I send and recieve SMS messages, but once I hook up a speaker and microphone (and perhaps a wee keypad?) I’ll have my very own custom cell phone

Took a bit to get the shield going.. apparantly the GSM transceiver sucks up to about 2A (!) to run properly. The only A/C adapter I had handy was 1.5Amp but it was still intermittently dropping out on me. Adding a 220uF capacitor between the +5v and GND on the shield got er running perfectly.

I ended up signing up the Arduino on Rogers for a $10/mo Pay as you Go plan (what IEMI number??).. figure this should be plenty for testing at 15 cents per SMS message. I haven’t had the chance to try data communication but the GSM module on this shield does sport it’s own little TCP/IP stack so who knows where we can go with this!

My aim with this setup is to eventually become a computer for the People’s Car. I figure I can do some nifty things with it with SMS messaging capabilities…

• Realtime GPS tracking system
• Emergency voice calling
• Vehicle monitoring via ODB-II interface
• Remote Start and Kill

So far I’ve had the shield setup as a USB gateway (allows me to communicate with the GSM module directly through a serial terminal). Once I get some actual Arduino code put together I’ll do up a little writeup soon about sending and recieving SMS and interfacing a keypad for those obligatory prank calls

I recently added the Renegade upgrade utility I wrote in 2005 to move just about every major RG release (from 10-05 to the latest at the time, 5-19.04). I may update that utility still to support the more recent versions, but for now you can use the standard upgrade packages to go from there.

Here you’ll find stuff that didn’t make it to other sites, or my tech blog, Web Surfs You! along with thoughts, ideas and personal projects. If you really think you need to follow this hilarity, then go ahead and subscribe to the RSS feed, I ain’t stopping ya!

So here we go, round two!