I have a project where I have to track the baskets of a supermarket, I would like to know if it possible to track those baskets using Bluetooth Technology. and show them in a map in real time using an android app.
Range of bluetooth is very small. So if the distance is big bluetooth will not be an appropriate solution.
What you can do is find and program some hardware, device which have location sensor (like gps) and wifi connectivity in it, to transmit its location to the server using wifi or on lan hosted server. Then you can generate the realtime map.
Hardware for Indoor Positioning
https://www.infsoft.com/technology/hardware
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I have an arduino robot and I wish to track its location on an indoor map on my android phone. I can create an indoor map and upload it to google maps. Depending on its location in the building the android would issue commands to the arduino robot to navigate to a specific area in the building or carry out some other task. How can I track its location at all times inside a building? If I set up beacons through out the building, I can make the arduino device advertise itself to these beacons.....then I would somehow need the beacons to communicate the arduino device location back to the android phone. Can someone tell me how to do this?
Building something that does this with iBeacons is not impossible, but it is a very advanced and complex project. Beacons would only be a very small building block of a complex system that does this.
Two basic approaches:
Place beacon transmitters all around the room, then write beacon scanning software on the Arduino that sends info to a web service about the beacon signals detected. The web service would crunch the numbers and calculate the position.
You could turn the Arduino into a beacon transmitter and place beacon scanners around the room. The scanners would report the signals from the Arduino transmitter to the sever, which would again crunch the numbers and calculate the position.
Either way, this is a very complex system to build. It is not something where a solution can provided in this forum.
I am looking for a way to transmit data when two phones are close by. This needs to be cross platform so I cannot use NFC or iBeacon. I plan on using allJoyn to send information. I would only like to send data to others that are within a few feet of me.
Is there any way that I could get an accurate reading of distance on other phones? Or can I get an accurate distance on a master device that could be placed in the room?
Shot in the dark answer:
If both devices are on the same wireless WiFi network (same subnet), then any devices on same network are "close enough".
When on the celluar network (or when only one device is on Wifi), use the Location APIs of the platform to get GPS coordinates. Send your coordinates up to a web server that keeps track of the Latitude/Longitude coordinates of each device. The web service also allows the devices to poll for nearby devices (where the distance equation can be computed on the server).
So the best way that I found to do this is to use the accelerometer to tell when two devices bump then I get the bluetooth signal strength of the nearest device, if that falls into a certain value then they are touching.
There are a lot of public places where your mobile phone is used for tracking. Your mobile device is used as identifier, for example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23665490
Is it possible to use an Android device as scanner to find the MAC addresses of nearby mobile devices?
I've found examples to scan Access points on an Android device but was not able to find more information about scanning for other devices.
If you would like to capture all the traffic closer to your android you would need to put your wlan card in monitor mode . This is not always possible as you will need root access and will depend on the phone, in the nexus models it is usually easy. When your card is in monitor mode you will be able to capture all traffic with sniffers like shark.
But without monitor mode you can still do some things.
You can check the devices connected to a wifi network with tools like Fing, you will need to be connected to that network.
For collecting data from hotspots you can use wifiAnalyzer, but this will not reveal the clients of the network.
Furthermore you can create a map and submit data of the hotspots with wigle, this is call walldriving and you can check information about hotspots in https://wigle.net/
Has anyone used the new Garmin GLO GPS receiver? Has anyone successfully integrated it with their mobile application? I was interested in using it in order to get more accurate GPS coordinates in my Android application, but would like to get some feedback from others before I buy one.
The Garmin website does not mention if there is an API available to retreive the GPS coordinates, it simply states, "Using Bluetooth technology, GLO wirelessly pairs to your mobile device. Just set GLO within range of your mobile device and in moments you’ll be receiving GLO’s position data."
How can you retreive this position data? Will applications on the device, such as Goolgle Maps, just get this data automatically? Any info or feedback about the device would be greatly appreciated.
More info on the device can be found at the following link:
https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=109827&ra=true
Todd
This question seems to get a decent amount of traffic and could use a more thorough answer.
Garmin probably feels justified in saying this:
Just set GLO within range of your mobile device and in moments you’ll be receiving GLO’s position data
because on iOS you can connect to the GLO and iOS uses the location information from the GLO to supply more accurate information to any device using the iOS location APIs. Android has no such facility. So, option one is to use an app that will read the NMEA data over BT and use that to set the mock location on your Android device (as Rodrigo said). Option two is what I do in my app: connect to the GLO or other BT GPS from directly in the app. Then I parse the NMEA lines myself and use that within the app. The downside of this is that each app which uses location must implement this themselves.
It's working for me with this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=googoo.android.btgps
It uses mock GPS location to inject the GLO's position.
I'd just like to ask for some clarifications regarding the GPS functionalities of android phones. When an application activates the GPS of a phone, will the phone need to be on a data plan or should activate the data traffic ( Settings > Wireless & Network settings > Mobile Networks > Data Traffic) for the GPS to get the phone's coordinates?
From Wikipdeia
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based satellite
navigation system that provides location and time information in all
weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed
line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. It is maintained by the
United States government and is freely accessible to anyone with a GPS
receiver.
If you talk specifically about GPS then it's nothing to do with the data plan or even with your service provider. GPS is totally independent of it. Think of a stand alone GPS receiver device e.g. Garmin GPS 10. It just connects to your laptop through Bluetooth (some with USB cable) and start sending GPS data to it. These devices normally output GPS data in NMEA format. Modern phones includes same sort GPS receiver circuit integrated in them. The thing different here is that these phones consumes GPS data for internally available rather than directly outputting in raw form. That's how you get GPS location information in iPhone and Android smart phones. On the other hand think of GPS navigation devices we use in our cars e.g. Garmin nuvi. It shows the location of car on the integrated maps. There is no sim card in it. Same is with GPS fitness watches.
A good question here is How GPS calculates the location? Best explanation I found is on HowStuffWorks. It's very easy and very well explained. Apart form GPS there are other positioning systems in the world, though GPS is oldest and most widely used. After GPS from US, there is GLONASS from Russia. Some phones support GLONASS too e.g. iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S III. Well there is nothing to worry for developers though. These phones internally use GPS and GLONASS to have high positional accuracy and gives the location in same way.
Other positioning systems includes Compass from China and Galileo. These are under development at the moment. For complete list check this Wikipedia article.
Edit: Location can be also be determined by mobile networks and wifi networks. For example Google Latitude tells your approximate location if you are connected with wifi and even you don't have GPS device connected. In case of location determination by mobile networks, the service provider may charge for location. Normally locations determined by mobile and wifi networks are not very accurate but location can be determined indoors which is a very big problem of GPS location calculation.
Hopefully it will help how things are working.
Cheers! :)
Atleast in India I can access use the GPS whenever I can see the sky, no data plan is required for me.
I haven't tried it on Android but it should be possible to get GPS co-ordinates without a data plan. My iPhone gets GPS locations even when out of reception, I can't see why android would be any different.