Padowan
Trail Blazer
I was doing some research into GPS trackers (eg Spot) that can update your position and publish it somewhere for people to track your progress live. I'm going on a solo off-road motorbike trip at the end of the summer and want to be able to show concerned people (eg my wife!) and interested partied (eg. everyone else!) where I have got to, and that I am safe and well. You can do this with a Spot tracker, but being a cheapskate, I started looking for something free/cheap.
I stumbled across an Android app called BubblerGPS that you can have running on your phone that will send your position details both periodically and automatically, and manually to the SpotWalla website, from where you can define trips, and share a URL that allows people to see all your position updates and status messages.
I went for the Pro version of Bubbler, which allows 5min automatic updates (instead of 15min with the free, Lite version) and the pro version also allows you to do things like upload photos attached to a manual position update. The Lite version can also only cache 5 position updates between data signals, whereas the pro version can cache 1,500.
So once you have everything installed on your Android phone, have configured the device in the app and have setup your Spotwalla account basically it works a bit like this:
Anyway - for what I want it for, it's going to be great (and now that there's a thread for motorbikes, I'll probably post up the URL of my trip int he summer for anyone interested!) and I thought I'd share the wisdom on here in case anyone else can make use of it.
I stumbled across an Android app called BubblerGPS that you can have running on your phone that will send your position details both periodically and automatically, and manually to the SpotWalla website, from where you can define trips, and share a URL that allows people to see all your position updates and status messages.
I went for the Pro version of Bubbler, which allows 5min automatic updates (instead of 15min with the free, Lite version) and the pro version also allows you to do things like upload photos attached to a manual position update. The Lite version can also only cache 5 position updates between data signals, whereas the pro version can cache 1,500.
So once you have everything installed on your Android phone, have configured the device in the app and have setup your Spotwalla account basically it works a bit like this:
- You start the app at the beginning of your journey and it'll just start tracking your position every 5 mins, if there's a data signal, this gets updated, if not the positions get cached.
- The app will only consider a GPS snapshot as a new position worth updating if it's more than 100m from the last point, so if you're stopped in one place and leave it running it'll not keep sending updates.
- You can go into the app at any time and select a manual update, there are predefined categories like Food, Fuel, Bed, Sight-seeing etc, or you can send a custom message, and with any manual update you can also attach a pic if you have the pro version.
- This continues ad-infinitum until you stop the app on your phone.
- On the website you can configure Trips - each trip basically has a start data/time and an end date/time and is essentially a collection of the position updates between those 2 dates/times - for each trip you get a URL that you can share, and then anyone can go in ans see what's happened.
Anyway - for what I want it for, it's going to be great (and now that there's a thread for motorbikes, I'll probably post up the URL of my trip int he summer for anyone interested!) and I thought I'd share the wisdom on here in case anyone else can make use of it.