Hi Everyone,
recently I’ve been involved in a non-profit project needed by the environmental service company of my city.
The project consists in:
- tracking the snow removal vehicles when they’re in action. They will be 20 units, more or less.
- create a map hosted on a website, displaying the current position of the vehicles
- displaying on the the vehicles tracks of the last hours, with the possibility of displaying and selecting custom contents (not yet well defined)
The purpose is to give a real time information to the citizens about which streets are clean and usable.
I would like to develop the project with open source software and keep it as simple as possible, in order to involve in the development not only software professionals but also everybody wants to take part in it or just learn something new.
I know projects like opengts or traccar, and I think they could meet my need…but I was wondering if there is a simple way in order to make by ourselves almost everything and learn how to do it.
I think we could do something like this:
a) android smarphones with a simple application or a hand made device based on Arduino stuff, capable of logging and sending data through http over mobile network.
b) some php page that receives the data (device-id,time, long, lat,…), stores them in a db (e.g. mysql or something similar…)
c) a cron-job that every few seconds/minutes makes a query on the db and writes a gpx file (maybe “compressed” with gpsbabel or similar) with the tracks of the vehicles. Then posting the gpx to openstreetmap
d) a simple web page showing the map with the tracks layer, refreshing the map every few seconds/minutes , using Leaflet javascript library and JQuery to do all custom features such as balloons with information on the map, user selection of some options, etc…
Do you have some suggestions? Can it be done? What could be the issues in this approach? Is it preferable to start with something already working and make just some customization?
Thank you!