Motorola V3 + GPS

Over the last week I’ve been contemplating on other devices which could implement our framework once built.

 

One of these devices is so abundant in today’s society that nearly everyone has one – the phone.

 

You take a  phone, or a PDA and couple it with a GPS device. Either inbuilt or via Bluetooth and you have a cheap tracking device.

 

There are two benefits associated with this.

 

1.       If Daniel dupes us on the WebTrac, which going by his past record of not coming up with the good is quite likely

2.       This can be used as a proof of concept of other devices integrating with the system.

 

 

I believe the actual communication interface is fairly simple, as all a ‘device’ is to do is use a http POST/GET coupled with the login information and a descriptor of the devices location – and voila – point on a map.

 

Now. If this was to be integrated with a phone. I thought why not use my phone for a PoC.  

 

Here’s what I need:

 

-          Gps device

-          Time

 

So what I did earlier in the week is purchase a Bluetooth GPS device off eBay for $103.53AUD. It’s a Holux GPSlim 236. Then added $24.99AUD for shipping.

 

 

The plan:

 

Use my phone (Motorola V3) to interface it with the Holux via Bluetooth. Then utilize a Simple J2ME NMEA parser to get the co-ordinates out.

 

Then write or find something that will  use GPRS to send a http query to a server.

 

I hope to do all this within the Java Micro-Edition. This is where the secord requirement comes in – time.

 

Hopefully I will find the necessary code pieces and won’t have to write too much from scratch.

 

I have been able to find the RAZR V3 (CLDC 1.1) Developer Guide on developer.motorola.com – which has some great code samples, for both Network + Bluetooth communication

 

Hopefully I’ll find what I need inside.

 

Also I have located a NMEA parser

 

With all the pieces set – I need to find a way to put them all together in an elegant and bugfree [can only hope] way.