Raspberry Pi based location tracker
My recently published DIY instructable to track any moving vehicle based on cell tower information has got 500+ visits in just a few days.
Simple Python scripts are used to fetch data from USB dongle, upload data to cloud. Client side HTML/JavaScript code shows location on Google Maps.
Try some DIY this holiday season 🙂
Vikash Gupta 
Hi, I’m Aditya from Indonesia. I’ve been looking at your project that could show us the location of raspberry pi without using GPS module. and I very interested to try this project. But, i’m newby with raspberry pi or python programming. so maybe i really need your help for my own project.
i’ve tried your tutorial on instructable.com , i’ve made an account of Weaved. and I’ve tried to connect it to my raspi, but it doesn’t work. maybe, if you would to help me, i need more specific step-by-step to connect my raspi to the client/user.
like, how to use the python code, how to connect my raspi to weaved, etc.
i’m sorry because i’m newby. but i’ll really appreciate your help.
Thank you.
LikeLike
Hello Aditya,
I’m glad you found it interesting!
To start with, let me tell you that I learned all the Python while developing the location tracker and anyone including you will be able to learn it pretty fast. You just need a little programming background.
To get the location without GPS, you will need to rely on cell tower location given by your mobile carrier. To start with I’d suggest check if the IP address of your Raspberry Pi gives you a good location approximation. To check the IP address of your RPi, login to it and run ifconfig command. Google ‘IP geolocation’, you will get a couple of web sites that can translate your IP address to physical location. If location provided by them is good approximation of your actual location, you can use simply use IP address to track your RPi. To do that, in geolocation.py set ‘considerIP’ to ‘true’.
If you need more accurate location, you need to obtain cell tower data as shown here
The pre-requisite for getting this data is to check if you are able to connect your RPi to a 3G USB dongle or a WIFI hotspot. I had used Macromax dongle, it may differ in your location. If you are able to get it connected, next step is to look for ‘Cell Tower’ in the router page. Generally it is 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 as shown above screenshot. After you see this data on the web page, you will need to customize simlocator.py to programmatically obtain this data.
I think if you reach till this point, rest of the steps will not be required to be changed.
All the best and do share how did it go…
LikeLike