Alright, so today I want to talk about this project I’ve been messing with – a tracker for lone workers. You know, those folks who work solo, maybe in remote spots or doing risky stuff. It got me thinking, how can we make their lives a bit safer?
I started by looking around at what’s already out there. I found these “lone worker apps” that use your regular smartphone. Pretty neat, I thought. They’re using the tech we all carry around to offer some protection. But most of them felt a bit clunky, not quite what I had in mind.
Digging Deeper
So I started playing with the idea of using GPS trackers. Then I came across this thing, the GH5200 personal GPS tracker. It looked promising, so I got my hands on one.
- First impressions: It’s pretty compact, not too bulky, which is good. Lone workers don’t want to be lugging around heavy gear.
- Setting it up: Honestly, it wasn’t too bad. Followed the instructions, and it connected to the network without too much fuss.
- Testing it out: I took it for a spin around the neighborhood, pretending I was a lone worker, out in the middle of nowhere. The tracker seemed to be doing its job, pinging my location pretty accurately.
Now, I wanted to see if I could make this thing even better, maybe build a little custom system around it. I started tinkering with some code, trying to get the tracker data into a simple dashboard. It was a bit of a headache at first, figuring out how to decode the data and display it in a way that made sense.
After a bunch of trial and error, a few late nights fueled by coffee, I finally got something working. I could see the tracker’s location on a map, updated in real-time. Felt like a real win!
Then I thought, what about alerts? What if a lone worker doesn’t check in, or if the tracker doesn’t move for a while? That could be a sign of trouble. So I added some features to send out alerts based on these conditions. It was tricky, I’ll admit, getting the timing right and making sure it didn’t send out false alarms all the time.
There were definitely moments where I wanted to throw the whole thing out the window. But I kept at it, and slowly but surely, it started to come together. I even roped in a couple of buddies to help me test it out. They pretended to be lone workers, and I monitored them from my makeshift control center (aka my living room).
We found a few bugs, naturally. Some alerts were getting delayed, and the map sometimes took a while to load. But overall, it was working pretty well. I was actually surprised at how much we managed to do with just a simple GPS tracker and some lines of code.
It’s still a work in progress, but I think this little tracker project has some real potential. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about giving lone workers an extra layer of safety, some peace of mind. And who knows, maybe it could even save a life someday. That’s what keeps me going, even when the code gets messy and the bugs seem endless.