Scripts and templates to make a balloon and chase-car tracking web page.
One can be tracked using the Spot Trace API, the other using a Raspberry Pi with GPS receiver and internet connection.
SPOT Trace GPS tracker with satellite phone communications. This is about the best hardware for tracking a high alititude balloon since it can send location details back to us on the ground, even when out of range of ground based mobile networks. There is an alititude limit of around 7000m so a flight computer is required if you would like to record the balloon position any higher.
Simply used for recording the location but without trasmission to the ground. This design can be enhanced to use low power short wave radio to communicate home but that's beyond this project... so far.
A raspberry pi with GPS receiver, running a bash script via cron which connects to the web server via ssh to transmit it's location.
The web page is nothing fancy, simple an HTML page that displays a Google Map which in turn loads KML files.
Get the FEED_ID from the findmespot.eu website by creating a new share feed:
https://login.findmespot.com/spot-main-web/myaccount/share/list.html
The FEED_ID is the glId parameter that appears in the feed details URL.
Simply run the spottrace/genindex.sh script with the FEED_ID and WEBROOT parameters. e.g.
/opt/scripts/balloon/spottrace/genindex.sh 1234567890 /var/www/mysite/
You should copy the webroot/balloon.png to your webroot else the current location icon will not appear on the map.
To have the script update the map automatically, you can setup a cron job. use crontab -e to edit and add something like
*/10 * * * * /opt/scripts/balloon/spottrace/genindex.sh 123456767 /var/www/mysite/
Assuming that you have saved the scripts into /opt/scripts.