Slashdot Mirror
GPS Trackers Find Novel Applications
Pickens writes "Inexpensive GPS devices like the Zoombak (which costs just $200 plus $10 a month) have becomes so prevalent that some people are using them routinely to keep tabs on their most precious possessions. Kathy Besa has a Zoombak attached to the collar of her 5-year-old beagle, Buddy. If Buddy wanders more than 20 feet from the house, she gets a text message on her phone that says, 'Buddy has left the premises.' The small size made possible by chip advances over the last two or three years is enabling many novel uses of GPS tracking. An art collector in New York uses one when he transports million-dollar pieces, a home builder is putting them on expensive appliances to track them if they disappear from construction sites, a drug company is using them after millions of dollars in inventory turned up missing, and a mobile phone company is hiding them in some cellphone boxes to catch thieves."
Ok, say I'm paranoid. Is there anything on the market that can detect these devices?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Isn't this the goal of RFID, to be able to track all your things.. but much much much cheaper than the zoombak's nutty price.
$200 + $120/year? Not "inexpensive" enough for me to stick onto my dog!
They have had tracking devices around for a while now. Are these just the first designed for non-police or non-military?
That's enough out of me.
$10 a month? I wonder if I put one in my car if I will get a $10 a month break in my car insurance bill.
-516
... no potential for abuse whatsoever!
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
to their employees. If any of them get to close to things like OSCON, Ballmer comes after them with a chair.
Need one for my mind, I feel like I am loosing that all the time.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
How come there is no first post? I'm confused.
Mahalik: She told me that she heard a zombie going through her trash the other day. The next morning, she turned up missing.
C. J.: What? Okay, back up. How in the hell do you "turn up missing"?
Mahalik: 'Cause nobody knows where you are when they realize you ain't there!
C. J.: So you telling me that you can appear and disappear at the same time.
Mahalik: No, man. You can't appear and disappear at the same time. The bitch ain't David Copperfield!
C. J.: Mmm. No, no. But you can't be gone from one place and show up somewhere else entirely. So when you turn up, you're never missing. And when you're missing, you never turn up.
Mahalik: Unless... you a zombie.
C. J.: Damn! Hey, that's some plausible shit right there. You should blog about that.
Mahalik: I'm gonna put that on MySpace.
C. J.: You do that!
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I work for what's left of a company that actually managed to go bust developing this stuff.
We faced several challenges with the technology. Power consumption gave us ulcers, as did mobile network coverage. This is a non-issue in the city, but just wait until you're out of town.
GPS wanders around enough from fix to fix, even with WAAS, that it can be tricky to compare fixes to detect movement, or to track movement of less than 50 meters. Oh, and the GPS needs to be able to hear satellite signals. Good luck on that.
Finally, once you have a fix back at your server, you need to make it meaningful to the user. They do not generally want a bare latitude and longitude. They want to know what street their car is on. When the parents want to know if the kids take the car too far from home, they want to enter a street address, not a latitude and longitude. This is harder to get right than it looks.
Favourite application: tracking sub-prime used cars so repo men can find them.
...laura
Am I missing something here? Don't mobile phones already have GPS (at least here in the USA)? And unique ID numbers burnt into them? Sure, another always-on GPS device could be handy for as long as the battery lasts (which begs the question of why can the battery last longer in the tiny GPS bug than it lasts in a consumer targeted GPS unit), but it would seem that most mobile phone thefts that could be caught with this GPS bug would be caught and tracked down as soon as the thief or buyer of the stolen property tried to use the phone anyway, and the phone could either be made useless (greatly reducing the incentive for theft) or let working (to help track down whoever has it, just as the GPS bug would do).
This sounds like something that was invented by the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
For $200 I will sell you a really nice leash. That will stop that pesky beagle from getting away.
It's funny how the Times' editors felt it necessary to punctuate each letter in "G.P.S.". What is this, the Man from U.N.C.L.E.? Maybe some year they'll realize that GPS is regular everyday stuff. You know, like A.T.M. machines and D.V.D. players.
I've been wondering how long this would take to get into a more public role. I've had ham radio based APRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Position_Reporting_System) installed in my cars for a while. When I show people a publicly available map of my travels, reaction ranges from salivating impressed (it's probably been ham radio's last "killer app"), to absolute horror ("you mean, you don't care if people know where you are?").
But, I think a lot of people would willingly turn on such a feature (say, on a mobile phone with a GPS chip and a GPRS connection.
Anyway, I read the article to our beagle and asked her opinion. She points out that beagles do not run away, they are called away on urgent tracking business. She feels that any human that hangs out with beagles and wants to attach tracking boxes to them is a distrustful person who possibly lacks the right spiritual qualities. She also reminds me that she can detect a beagle treat coming out of the bag across three fields, and that in any case anyone who has trouble with beagles taking off is simply not taking them for sufficiently long walks. She thinks I should notify the ASPCA before relations completely break down between this unfortunate beagle and its lazy, distrustful owner.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
actually, the nursing home my grandma lives in uses this sort of thing for their advanced alzheimer's patients. they implemented it after one of them wandered out last winter and died from exposure.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The advantage of using dumb old radios is that you can operate independent of any fixed infrastructure, so it's usable even where you don't have cell coverage.
Tracking something small like a dog (I've had inquiries about kangaroos, too) introduces the problem of antenna placement, though. APRS is typically used on the 2-meter band, which means a quarter-wave vertical antenna is half a meter long. I did once put a passive data logger on my cat, and found that she roams a little more widely than I thought, but that doesn't really count.
The advantage of relatively low frequencies and high transmit power is that you can cover a radius of 20 miles from one mountaintop digipeater (equivalent to a cell site), and they're not difficult to make solar powered.
There's a nationwide digipeater network in the US, and most of Europe is covered as well, along with much of New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. I think there are at least two APRS-capable satellites on orbit too, though PCSAT-1 is dying. Internet gateways are all over the place, so you can map APRS stations online, and not have to maintain any receive-side hardware of your own.
I'm constantly surprised by the applications people come up with for this stuff. The most recent I heard was someone with a cable TV company who found that he could drive around and transmit at low power every couple of seconds and use a receiver back at the headend to plot ingress leaks in the cable system.
Add to that the fact that you can do two-way text messaging, weather, and telemetry, and it's more than worth the hassle of taking a simple multiple-choice license exam. It's this sort of thing that's going to save ham radio (if anything can) - talking to people around the world just doesn't interest people as much these days, when it's so easy to do on the Internet or the phone.
So as long as the alzheimers patients put their shoes on, they can't wander away? Or maybe the staff just ties the knots really tight so they can't get them off.
Many elderly patients have tender feet and don't make it past the parking lot. Most all always wear shoes. As part of my old tech job service calls was part of the job. I have seen it in action. The patients rarely venture off the carpet or tile without shoes. The hardier patients simply get the tags in other clothing items, walking aids, wheelchairs, or other essentials, but most monitoring can be done with the shoes and this reduces the tag inventory needed. It's very rare for patients to wander off without clothing or walking aids.
The truth shall set you free!
My GPS Tracker sent me this, about Buddy:
"Buddy has left the preferences"
"Buddy is in the neighbor's trash"
"Buddy is running into the street"
"Buddy is in the same position as a Chevy Suburban"
"Buddy is stopped on the street"
"A google satellite photo is attached with a picture of Buddy"
"Google Adwords has selected "Shovel" as something that you might need with Buddy."
This is my sig.
"Chair has moved 20 feet outside conference room window"
12:50 - press return.