gps

332 Articles

FBI Tracking Device Found; Disassembled

May 9, 2011 by 46 Comments

[ifixit] has apparently grown tired of tearing apart Apple’s latest gizmos, and their latest display of un-engineering has a decidedly more federal flair. You may have heard about Yasir Afifi’s discovery of a FBI-installed tracking device on his car back in October of last year. Apparently, the feds abandoned a similar device with activist Kathy Thomas. Wired magazine managed to get their hands on it, and gave it to ifixit to take apart. There’ve even posted a video.

The hardware itself isn’t that remarkable, it’s essentially a GPS receiver designed before the turn of the century paired with a short range wireless transceiver. The whole device is powered by a set of D-sized lithium-thionyl chloride batteries which should be enough juice to run the whole setup for another few decades–long enough to outlast any reasonable expectations of privacy, with freedom and justice for all.

Scout, The Autonomous Transatlantic Boat

May 2, 2011 by 22 Comments

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Sailing a small boat across the Atlantic ocean is quite the daunting task. As many have discovered, it is a journey often fraught with perils, typically ending in failure. A team of four college students decided the best way to get a small boat across the ocean would be to remove the human element from the process, so they set off to build an autonomous craft to take on the task.

Like most projects, this one started as a handful of wild ideas exchanged between friends [Dylan Rodriguez and Max Kramers]. As they thought about it more, they decided that turning [Max’s] sailboat into an autonomous ocean-going craft would be pretty awesome, so they got to work. Recruiting help from their friends [Brendan Prior and Ricky Lyman], the project started to quickly take shape, and Scout was born.

Scout is 8 feet long and consists of foam core covered in carbon fiber. It is filled with various electronic components such as a SPOT tracker, a battery bank that will power the boat for up to 25 hours, and the various servos and motors which will be used to pilot the craft.

It’s a rather ambitious project, though the boat is nearly complete – just in time for their launch, slated for May 29th. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this project as the launch date approaches – good luck guys!

Head on over to their Kickstarter page to see a promo video introducing Scout.

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Simple AVR Based GPS Tracker

April 23, 2011 by 7 Comments

The latest project from Lucidscience.com is a simple AVR based GPS tracker. As usual, the instructions here are quite in-depth including schematics and step by step procedures all the way down to modifying cables when necessary. What we found interesting is that the GPS module he’s using is so simple. It only requires 3 wires, one for power, one for serial communication, and one for a heartbeat.

For the microprocessor, he’s using an ATMega 324, which is a bit of processing overkill but he needed the SRAM for the GPS point storage. You could obviously expand to external storage but the goal here was to keep it extremely simple. Actually, there just isn’t a whole lot here other than the microprocessor, the GPS module, and a level converter. After wrapping up the circuit he goes on to explain how to get the data into Google Earth for display. After a few trips around the block you can see the results are quite nice.

IPhone Watching Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make

April 20, 2011 by 89 Comments

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Most people tend to enjoy a certain modicum of privacy. Aside from the data we all share willingly on the web in the form of forum posts, Twitter activity, etc., people generally like keeping to themselves.

What would you think then, if you found out your iPhone (or any iDevice with 3G) was tracking and logging your every movement?

That’s exactly what two researchers from the UK are claiming. They state that the phone is constantly logging your location using cell towers, placing the information into a timestamped database. That database is not encrypted, and is copied to your computer each time you sync with iTunes. Additionally, the database is copied back to your new phone should you ever replace your handset.

We understand that many iPhone apps use location awareness to enhance the user experience, and law enforcement officials should be able to pull data from your phone if necessary – we’re totally cool with that. However, when everywhere you have been is secretly logged in plaintext without any sort of notification, we get a bit wary. At the very least, Apple should consider encrypting the file.

While this data is not quite as sensitive as say your Social Security number or bank passwords, it is dangerous in the wrong hands just the same. Even a moderately skilled thief, upon finding or swiping an iPhone, could easily dump the contents and have a robust dataset showing where you live and when you leave – all the makings of a perfect home invasion.

Continue reading to see a fairly long video of the two researchers discussing their findings.

[Image courtesy of Engadget]

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Magellan GPS Hack For Hassle-free Charging

April 20, 2011 by 21 Comments

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Hackaday reader [Paul] recently shared a simple hack he put together via our Flickr photostream.

It seems that his Magellan GPS unit is pretty finicky when it comes to power supplies. When connected to the Magellan adapter, the GPS unit charged as you would expect. When connected to a PC, it sensed the connection and allowed its file system to be mounted, just as it was intended to do.

However, a problem arose when he tried hooking the Magellan up to a different power supply. The unit still thought it was connected to a PC, and refused to perform any GPS-related functions since its file system was tied up. Not wanting to lug around multiple chargers, he decided to see what the heck was going on with his GPS unit.

He pulled the plug apart and found that the 4th and 5th pins of the USB cable were shorted together. While most devices ignore the 4th pin, the Magellan checks to see if that pin is grounded. If so, it assumes it is connected to its power supply. If not, it assumes that it should act as if it is connected to a PC.

With this information in hand, [Paul] did the same thing as any of us would and hacked together a USB cable with shorted pins. The cable can be attached to any standard USB port or charger, saving him from having to lug around an extra adapter.

EagerFeet Lets You Scrape Your Nike+ Data From The Web

April 19, 2011 by 4 Comments

Runners that wear shoes with the Nike+ system can upload GPS data about their runs to the proprietary website. If you’ve been using this for a while you may be reluctant to switch to another service that works with the hardware because you don’t want to lose the historical data. Faced with this issue, [Robert Kosara] developed some software that can scrape Nike+ data. Not only did he write the code, but he also threw up a website that shows how well it works. EagerFeet lets you copy and paste your Nike+ ID for mapping on Google Maps.

Data is scraped from Nike+ and assembled as GPX files, which are backups of GPS data. From there you can use it for whatever you like. Since the code is available in a Git repository it’s easy to depend on it with your own projects, and still get updates if the scraping system needs to be changed in the future. Even if you don’t want to use the GPX files in your own projects, they can be imported on some third party exercise tracking sites if that’s what you’re interested in.

Of course you could try to pull the data straight off of your iPod.

Real-time GPS Tracker With Mobile Phone Uplink

April 14, 2011 by 12 Comments

[jayesh] wasn’t actually trying to solve any clever problems when we built his homebrew GPS tracker. He just had the hacker mentality and wanted to build something fun and useful while geeking out with electronics and software.

On the hardware side, he started with an Arduino, then added a GPS module for location detection and a GMS/GPRS module for the data uplink to his server over AT&T’s network. The Arduino uses several libraries and plenty of custom code. On the server, he worked up some wizardry with open-source packages and the Google Maps API. All of the source code and hardware details are well-documented. Put together, it’s a GPS tracker that can update a map in real-time. Sure, there are commercial products that do roughly the same thing, but where’s the fun in that? The principles here can also be put to good use in other microcontroller-based projects.