I’ve been on a hunt for a cheap GPS Tracking unit for a long time, most rely on cellular network, or crowd sourcing Bluetooth. Most of these units cost $50+ and involve some questionable company hosting your data. On top of the initial investment, i’m sure no one would want to spend 20$ a month on data plans.
This project utilizes GPSLogger integration which sends the lat + long + speed + battery + Accuracy over the helium network which then gets sent via webhook to your homeassistant
In order to utilize cost and practicality, ive decided to look into helium now Nova Labs, as the Helium network utilizes lorawan bands to send or receive information. with close to 1M+ hotspots world wide, most major cities have fairly decent coverage, see explorer.helium.comfor a map of your area.
Upfront investment was about $25 CAD and I have 2 trackers on two seperate cars running for over a year now and have only spent $0.20 of tracking, each vehicle driven ~ 10,000 - 25,000 KM since starting.
The tracker itself is the Heltec HTCC-AB02S, and is plugged in via a usb micro fuse tap and hidden in the A-pillar. Pictures to come
With the ability to send downlinks utilizing this network, it is possible to issue simple outputs as well to lock / unlock vehicle + remote start.
Note: that i have now moved from a HTCC-AB02S to a LoRaWAN Tracker LW001-BG PRO. Integrating with the traccar integration.
The main reason for this switch is to avoid hardwiring any devices. as well as faster GPS locking.
No, you do not need to be inside the hexagons to utilize the network. depending on your antenna setup, in extreme cases there has been up to 100+ km range, for my day to day use, I can usually pickup these nodes or hotspots up to a few km away as i’m driving. Obviously this goes without saying that your mileage may vary depending on your location. Even if your location doesn’t have a hotspot active, there is a high probability that the tracker will still be able to pick up neighbouring hotspots to send / receive packets
Do you have any screenshots of what you’re seeing? Are you seeing this in the serial log?
im assuming you setup your board with the correct parameters such as below and downloaded/installed the correct drivers?
Please refer to this video on how to get the Arduino up and running, You can just copy and paste the code found in my github instead of the one found in the video.
In terms of setting up the Arduino, start at 5:00.
Feel free to DM me to screen share if you require
Thank you I’ll have to play with that tomorrow I’ve been staring at this thing all day and it’s not going well hahahha SO tomorrow is another day. Thank you!! I do have the arduino seeing it so there’s that!
This is basically the board trying to connect to a helium hotspot / node, I’m not sure what your location is relative to a hotspot, but just a couple things to check first.
Have you ensured that you’ve attached the included antenna to the right slot, there are two, one External GPS slot and one LoRaWan Antenna Slot, you want to attach the antenna to the one beside the screen
Because it’s having issues trying to connect to a Helium Node, you can try gaining some elevation or be in a open area, eg your second floor window and trying again.
Thank you for the input.
The antenna is correct
I think the problem I’m having is I’m trying to connect inside the house…
I’m going to have to start all over again I’ve been trying so many things I think I have some of info wrong. So I’ll do it again then move it outside by my car and try again.
Thanks for posting. I just saw this post yesterday, order a HTCC-AB02S, and arrived today. After having some issues getting it to compile with Arduino IDE, I switched to VSCode/Platformio and compiled without issues.
I love the idea of pulling the car’s OBD2 data (milage, battery level, etc) and posting that information to Home-Assistant. I’ll have to keep my eye out for a way to do that.
