This is a new service offering. Yes there is a charge. No it’s not free. The backend system is a commercial Telematics system used by hundreds of companies, governments and other systems around the world. This costs me money to operate but I wanted to bring it to Home Automation so I’ve done what I can to drop the pricing to bare minimum for those with interest or need.
The system is geared towards the DIY/IOT crowd. You bring your own device and data plan or you can purchase one through us. Be aware the cheap devices on E-Bay and Amazon are well cheap devices and some of them are locked to their seller’s service at a hardware level not SIM and for some it requires special hardware to perform a firmware reset. Contact us for information on re-configuring devices. Mobile apps are available and we work with other 3rd party mobile apps as well. Note that mobile apps no matter the upstream provider all suffer from the same problems with Android/IOS limitations and battery consumption for fast/accurate reporting. We recommend and prefer hardware devices.
This is a Commercial Telematics system. The most common feature set people know of is GPS Tracking. With this you would use a mobile device (phone, battery operated GPS tracker) or a hardwired or connected tracker (OBDII Plugin) that would send positional data to the upstream system.
With this you create geofences and from those you can create notifications. Notfications can take many forms of standard messaging of e-mail, sms, but we also provide HTTP via a POST/GET method. This is the important part missing from “other” GPS solutions as they limit or don’t have a way to integrate with external systems. Through a POST request or GET you can set switches or run commands on remote servers. This can be integrated into Home Assistant through the Web API either via portforwarding (not recommended) or via a tunnel or webhook relay of some form. I have tested with webhookrelay.com
Simplex Locate has been integrated and tested with HomeSeer, Hubitat and Vera as well.
Outside the box of basic geofence is the ability to also read vehicle sensor data or external sensors attached to or sending data to the telematics device. Sensors of typical use are temperature sensors used in commercial vehicles (trucks with refrigerated trailers) but can be other sensors with 1-wire support or BlueTooth support. A project we are working on is to utilize a phone BT signature for performing Driver Identification and passengers presence.
Along with receiving sensor data it is also possible to SEND commands to the telematics devices to perform actions or to reconfigure them. A provided mobile app has the ability to enable remote control where you can configure and stop/start the the app. A use case is set the phone to idle tracking profile while “Home” and then reconfigure the device when the user leaves home to set it to an “Active” profile. The idea here is to conserve battery when at a “known” location and the location and event is not of real use yet have the device running in real-time mode to be able to trigger events such as when they arrive “Home” or another location where an event is supposed to be triggered.
