During my free time I like to take motorcycle trips and if you ever ridden a motorcycle for a long distance you will know that it can be a bit more difficult to take care of things that are normally pretty easy in the car.  With that said, I probably don’t check in with my spouse as often as I should.  Being that a motorcycle poses a higher chance of injury than a car, my wife tends to worry if she hasn’t heard from me in awhile.  To try and alleviate some of this anxiety I looked into a number of tracking systems where my wife could easily look to see where I have been.  There are numerous vendors out there using gprs and sms to update a database with your location.  Many of these are quite costly for the base unit and the actual fees for access to the database.  Being the embedded design engineer I am I knew there had to be a better way. So for about $100 for hardware and $15/month for sms’s you have the Twitter Tracker as seen below.

Alex over at Tinkerlog posted about using the Telit GM862, Twitter, and Google Maps for a mobile tracking solution. Although Alex did not link all these directly, I put the pieces of the puzzle together to see the solution you see here today.  Overall the design is complete and very professional through the use of a proper pcb and enclosure from SFE.

Overall the idea is pretty simple.  I use a pre-paid unlimited SMS plan ($15/month) through T-Mobile that allows me to send SMS messages.  By registering the mobile number of the assigned SIM card I can register this account with Twitter.  By doing so I am then able to send Google Map links right to my twitter account every 60 seconds when I am riding.  These Google Map links are done by using the gps location from the gps device on the GM862 through the use of the GPSACP command.  Parsing this string for the lat/lon locations in DDMM.MMMM format to Decimal Degrees.  Results of these actions can be seen at the twitter page for my motorcycle.

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It’s taken us quite awhile after becoming familiar with the techniques used by Scott at Curios Inventor for his Arduinome Cases, but we have finally designed a case for a customer using these techniques.  We used 4-40 hardware and 1/4″ acrylic.  I was a little skeptical about how sturdy the case would be but it all worked out very well. See the images below for more details. 

Capacitive Touch Board

Having access to an LPKF router has really allowed us to expand some of the quick prototyping that we need to do for new applications.  Today I assembled a 10F206 touch board based off this Microchip example.  I have a few ideas on how I can make a nice compact design for use in a number of projects.  Stay on the lookout for updates and possibly a new product!