Vehicle Fleet Monitoring with #AdafruitIO #IoTuesday
Moheeb Zara on Hackster is tracking fleets of vehicles in real-time using maker-friendly hardware and powering it using an Adafruit IO dashboard:
But why would you want to track a fleet of vehicles?
There are numerous reasons to monitor a fleet of vehicles. Some organizations just want to track location, which is essentially just asset tracking, while others want to monitor the health of a vehicle. This can be helpful when needing to ensure that your vehicles are getting the maintenance they need. This improves safety and provides an insight into how to improve operations. It also helps in deploying a vehicle to where it can best serve.
As for the hardware he’s using,
I’ll be using a USB OBDII adapter (see link above) connected to a Raspberry Pi with a standard GPS module wired to the GPIO pins. With the Hologram Nova, a USB GSM modem, I’ll be able to add remote connectivity to the vehicle tracker. Hologram.io provides amazing coverage at a very maker friendly cost. Best part is, someone could easily take this hack and turn it into a product ready to deploy.
This is a really neat project to begin with, and the integration of Adafruit IO makes visualizing the real-time tracking data a breeze to implement!
Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.
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Here at Adafruit, we sell all of these amazing components, but we couldn’t find a good way to interact with them over the internet. There are certainly a lot of great services out there for datalogging, or communicating with your microcontroller over the web, but these services are either too complicated to get started, or they aren’t particularly fun to use. So, we decided to experiment with our own system, and that is how Adafruit IO got started.