This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie talk with JP Mens about Owntracks, the collection of programs that lets you take back control of your own location data. It’s built around the simple idea of taking position data from a mobile phone or other data source, sending it over MQTT to a central server, and logging that data to a simple data store.
From there, you can share it as trips, mark points of interest, play back your movement in a web browser, and more. And because it’s just JSON inside MQTT, it’s pretty trivial to make a connector to interface with other projects, like Home Assistant. We’ve even covered the process!
– Project Web site: https://owntracks.org/
– Documentation: https://owntracks.org/booklet/
– Source code: https://github.com/owntracks
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Next week we’re interviewing Jan-Piet Mens of the OwnTracks project!
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Finally, a podcast that puts a name to my dental regimen!
Great episode, guys. Owntracks sounds really neat.
I did set up Owntracks after reading the first article, and I really liked how modular each step of the way was and the clear easy formats of the data. But you can’t leave the app running in the background on modern Android, it has to be opened at least once per boot. I thought this was manageable but basically any time I wanted to rely on it, it turned out my wife’s phone wasn’t logging data for this reason (as I’d jumped through the three other hoops you need to do).
I understand why phone OSes make it hard, it should be hard. My wife and I discussed the ethics of autoreporting our locations to each other (and I like Owntracks has a nice “stop now” button available too). But I’m letting the HomeAssistant Companion do it instead now, as we’re both already opening that, so all the logging is for free.