bbgps (short for Big Brother GPS)

About

A very simple web interface for the great Android application called Big Brother GPS that regularly sends the phone position to a server via a POST request. It supports authentication via a secret and reports various parameters (latitude, longitude, speed, bearing, altitude, battery level, accuracy, provider etc.)

Demo

You can check a running version of this application here. Some details:

• we made the trip (Romania - Italy - France - Spain and back) in August 2014
• I used an old Google Nexus S phone that I kept in the car and charged it only while driving
• had to manually switch mobile providers a few times (usually at border crossings)
• I set-up the Android application to send the position every 3 minutes; it worked quite OK and the battery usually lasted around two days
• the application is hosted on a Raspberry PI 2 running in my house
• I have a dynamic IP from my ISP so there might be some DNS update delay (usually due to power outages), the domain is hosted at Free DNS

Some screenshots:

Requirements

This web interface is written in Python and uses the following packages:

• Tornado for the webserver part
• pymongo for the database part
• optionally pyproj for cartographic transformations utility function (not used for the web interface)
• other APIs used: Google Maps Javascript, Google Charts, jQuery

Installation

• install the above packages
• copy the settings file (cp settings_default.py settings.py)
• edit the settings (mainly SECRET and DB_URI)
• make sure you have MongoDB running or use a hosted service (I used the free version from MongoLab mainly because getting MongoDB to run on RaspberryPi is tedious)
• start the application python -u bbgps.py &>> bbgps.log &