VoltLog Replaces a Decommissioned Chinese GPS Tracking Server with Traccar on a Raspberry Pi 4
Finding the GPS trackers he bought disconnected, VoltLog's Florin C turned to a Raspberry Pi for a homebrew alternative.
VoltLog founder Florin C has published a guide to setting up a private GPS tracking server on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer — though with instructions which are also applicable to other machines running both Windows or Linux.
"The idea started a couple of videos back, when I got this GPS tracker disguised into a general purpose automotive relay," Florin explains. "In theory this should come with free online tracking service on some Chinese hosted server but I wasn’t able to connect to that server and so I thought why not setup my own server and try to pair it with this tracker.
Florin's solution to the inaccessible — and not-very-private — remote tracking server was to install the open source Traccar location tracking platform on a spare Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer, forwarding a port on the edge router to ensure that the remote tracker can send location updates. Traccar is then paired with the particular tracking dongle.
It's here where the tracker itself needs a little modification. "The final step is to configure the GPS tracker and these particular commands apply to the tracker that I am using, you might have to use different commands for a different tracker but the idea is to reset the tracker, set your admin number, configure the APN settings for your network operator, set the external ip address we saved earlier, the port is 5013. Set the upload frequency in seconds and enable the GPRS connection. Going back to the Traccar web interface, status should switch to online and we should start seeing data about our device."
More information is available on the VoltLog blog.