ESP board with GNSS/Galileo and LTE/5G as a device tracker

I am looking for a board that can be easily integrated to HA with capability to use Galileo and GPS preferably and send it over cellular to my HA instance. I need about ten devices so paying a proprietary antitheft-kind solutions is not the way.

I found waveshare, which is unnecassarily big

and soracom walter which seems to be it as the company has very cheap tarifs with sims for networks around the world but they dont sell to different EU countries than France, Germany, then UK and USA

Has anybody dealt with this problem and are there some out-of-the-box cheap solutions? Thanks

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Hi,

I’m the creator of the Walter module and although we are good friends with Soracom there is no SIM lock at all on Walter and you can use any IoT SIM card you like.

We are continuously working on expanding our list of distributors but already today we have worldwide availability: Walter - Multi-radio (LTE-M, NB-IoT, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth) module with ESP32-S3

With Walter you have WiFi, BLE, LTE-M, NB-IoT and GNSS in a single, certified module. The GNSS is shared with the LTE radio to save power. This means that it is not a continuously tracking GPS because you must be in PSM mode or disconnected from cellular to do a fix. Because the GNSS is very low power it is a bit less sensitive than a dedicated module and you need to be outside for the GNSS to lock. If you are inside I would advise to use BLE or WiFi for tracking.

All info is on our website: https://www.quickspot.io and we also offer chat support via our discord channel.

For Home Assistant integration you can use MQTT.

Best regards,
Daan

Hi Daan,
thank you for your reply. Would you be so kind and provide me/us with more detailed step-by-step guide how to build it? Just some hints where to look could be fine.

My use case is to build a low power board that would track my ebike in case of theft. I will charge it by usbc from the ebike control unit and think about some small powerthrough powerbank as ups.

The easiest way for me is to build it on rapsberry pi, which I can tweak by some other sensors such as lte/gnss/vibration but the power draw is denying without buffy powerbank for which the bike frame does not provide me enough space. And finally it’s still a bike, so I do not want to make it heavier.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.

Hi @Vahaldor,

Sorry for the late reply. The Walter board comes pre-flashed with a tracker application that uploads data to our demo portal. This will get you started out-of-the box and it will allow you to evaluate the hardware without programming.

What I would do are these steps:

  1. Make a nice casing and find a good spot to build-in Walter on your e-bike. Make sure the GPS antenna is not obstructed by metal (under the saddle for example).
  2. Test if the reception is good and the SIM card works using the demo portal.
  3. Adapt the positioning sketch walter-arduino/examples/Positioning at main · QuickSpot/walter-arduino · GitHub and change the IP address and port to the UDP listener port and public IP of your home assistant interface.
  4. Use the node-red plugin to receive and process the messages (Receiving UDP traffic - #39 by Patryk69)

I hope this helps.

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I would like to flash it with ESP Home and configure it myself. I need to attach the 18650 battery, accelerometer to detect movement, speaker for the alarm sound and CAN communicator to turn off/on the engine of the ebike. Do you provide basic documentation, so we can configure it with ESP Home and integrate it to home assistant?

I was finally successful with ESP32-S3 and GNSS module in ESP home, however, it seems to me that when I add 4G dongle and connect it to the ebike’s battery, it will take quite significant amount of power, sure, I can “arm” it only when needed, so for my use case, this might be the way I already achieved. Waveshare seems to me to require ESP IDF for proper development and that’s beyond my current knowledge and available time.

However, I would still like to proceed with Walter given the focus on low power management and neat design I like. @dpape would you answer some questions?

  1. Do you have documentation to allow us to use ESP home, configure GPS, LTE and connect a battery or do you recommend proceeding with Arduino IDE or something else?

  2. If I want to connect the sensors such as accelerometer, what would be your thoughts on it?

Thank you!

I am in USA and very interested in Using the Walter GPS in ESPHome/HA as well. I would greatly appreciate the answers to your questions, and support from Walter. You might get better response to your questions on the QuickSpot Walter Discord channel it seems to be active!. Also Looking for sim card recommendations for USA.

Hi, if we can work on it together that would be great. I am not a developer, just a tinkerer with some technical expertise, but I need several trackers, so I am ready to finish this.

First, here is a github project that is focused on GNSS and LTE capabilities of ESP32 boards for ESP HOME. Though not finished but they reached some success.

Second, I was able to generate a code with the newest ChatGPT o3 model to make work the waveshare board in ESP HOME, so both GNSS and LTE seems to work but not full TCP/IP communication. I did not have time to continue. I fully understand that all professional developers would hate AI assistance, however, I was able to achieve it step by step with the documentation. So I had to understand the architecture in theoretical way, focus on details such as exemptions in AT commands on waveshare board, then I reported the model the errors and it is working. I understand the code and seems quite simple and neat to me. I haven’t tried the same with Walter but will in the coming weeks. The waveshare, btw, does not send NMEA messages from the GPS/GNSS module. It is integrated on the A7670 chip, so you have to communicate using AT commands. I am not sure, whether Walter is the same. They have a code for Micropython developed already.

Third, my testing model with ESP32-S3 WROOM board and a separate 4g/LTE dongle (so not a board with LTE and GNSS in one chip) has become a problem, because it seems to me that Magenta in Vienna blocks my communication for Wireguard VPN, which is necessity for any approach. The device must be on the same network as home assitant.