psrinivassan / open-gpstracker

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Controlling GPS from Server #296

Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 8 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 8 years ago
What do you consider a good addition to the application?

When the phone uploads locations continuously to a website the battery drains 
very quickly. (I understand power usage is linked to the frequency that the GPS 
service is utilised?) 

I think this problem can be overcome by "controlling" the GPS functionality 
from a server. 

Basically the application should poll the server on a regular basis to check if 
it should activate GPS and upload its position. From the server you can then 
instruct the phone to upload the position at shorter or longer intervals. e.g. 
when someone is actually viewing the phone's location on the website.

1. Describe the function
An additional setting should be added where phone user sets the interval to 
poll the server. 

When the phone polls the server it posts the phone's ID (or whatever parameters 
you specify) and reads a return value (true/false) that tells the phone when to 
get a GPS fix and upload the position to the server.

2. Give an example on how this could fit with the current usage

I want to track a sales consultant, but tracking him continuously eats up his 
phones battery live. The current mehod of uploading data to the server 
continuously is also expensive (i.e. bandwidth costs) when tracking is set to 
normal/fine.

With this new feature a phone user can set the phones tracking accuracy to 
Coarse/Global. 

When a manager logs onto the website and views that specific phone's position, 
the server instructs the phone to get a fix and upload the position more 
frequently (i.e. every time the phone polls the server).

The server does this by sending a return value of "True" when the phone is 
polling.

When the manager logs of the server reverts back to sending a False response 
and the phone continues by only sending waypoints on Coarse/Global intervals.

3. Would this method save bandwidth comparing to posting positions to the 
server on a continuous basis?

Yes, because let's say the phone pings the server once every minute, it will 
only send through the phone's ID and receive a true/false bit value.

Its only when the server responds with a "True" flag that the phone will query 
the GPS and upload the location.

4. I am a .Net developer and unfortunately do not have Java experience, but

We have an ASP .Net web application that you can use to test this feature. It 
currently receives the location from Open GPS TRacker and plots it on a google 
map. 

Let me know if you would be interested in adding this feature so that we can 
work together.

Henco
henco@sms4pro.com

Original issue reported on code.google.com by qualit...@gmail.com on 17 Dec 2011 at 8:47