Tag: free

How To Create Your Very Own GPS Tracking System For Your Car

Creating your very own GPS system for cars is really a lot easier than you think.  In days long past you would to have had a hell of a lot of technical experience, a great understanding of how to create software, and a lot of money to get something like real-time GPS tracking to work for yourself.  You would have had to buy a ton of equipment that you would never normally use and spend countless hours coding software and making firmaware so that your devices could interact with your software.  This process would be both time and money intensive and very few of us would be able to get through it.

Today, it is a totally different story.  All you need to create an awesome, real-time GPS tracking system for your car is a navigational GPS that has bluetooth capabilities and a cell phone that can run a free GPS tracking application called 3dtracking.  It will also help to have a good cell phone plan with your provider that has plenty of data sending capabilities.  That is it.

The Equipment Needed

The GPS

The very first thing that you are going to need is going to be a GPS navigation unit.  This is because the 3dtracking software must have access to coordinates generated by a GPS device in order to provide real-time GPS tracking information.  Without some form of GPS information to feed your cell phone that is loaded up with this free GPS tracking software you are not going to be able to get yoru desired results.

While I don’t personally have a navigational GPS, I have heard some good things about the following devices that have Bluetooth capabilities:

If these prices are still to high for you personally then you might want to consider trying to find a refurbished GPS.  A refurbished device can sometimes come at a very steep discount (from 20%-50% in some cases) and it should work just as well as a ‘new’ device.

In some cases you won’t even need to own a stand alone car navigation GPS for this system to work. If you own a phone with GPS tracking capabilities already installed into the phone then you don’t need to connect to an external GPS device via Bluetooth.  Everything that you are going to need is going to be inside the case of that cell phone.

The Cell Phone

3dtracking published a list of compatible cell phones for their system.  If you do not own one of these phones then you will not be able to use this system as I am describing it.  Here is a list of the cell phones that is currently compatible with this software:

  • Lenovo P930
  • LG KS10
  • Nokia 3230
  • Nokia 3250
  • Nokia 5320
  • Nokia 5500
  • Nokia 5700
  • Nokia 6110
  • Nokia 6120
  • Nokia 6121
  • Nokia 6210
  • Nokia 6220
  • Nokia 6260
  • Nokia 6290
  • Nokia 6600
  • Nokia 6620
  • Nokia 6630
  • Nokia 6670
  • Nokia 6680
  • Nokia 6681
  • Nokia 6682
  • Nokia 7610
  • Nokia E50
  • Nokia E51
  • Nokia E60
  • Nokia E61
  • Nokia E61i
  • Nokia E62
  • Nokia E63
  • Nokia E65
  • Nokia E66
  • Nokia E70
  • Nokia E71
  • Nokia E90
  • Nokia N70
  • Nokia N71
  • Nokia N72
  • Nokia N73
  • Nokia N75
  • Nokia N76
  • Nokia N77
  • Nokia N78
  • Nokia N79
  • Nokia N80
  • Nokia N81
  • Nokia N81 8GB
  • Nokia N82
  • Nokia N85
  • Nokia N90
  • Nokia N91
  • Nokia N92
  • Nokia N93
  • Nokia N93i
  • Nokia N95
  • Nokia N95 8GB
  • Nokia N96
  • Panasonic X700
  • Panasonic X800
  • Samsung SGH-D720
  • Samsung SGH-D730
  • Samsung SGH-i400
  • Samsung SGH-i520
  • Samsung SGH-Z600

(Be sure to check the compatible cell phone list over at 3dtracking’s website in case this list has become out of date)

Some of these phones are rather inexpensive (some can be found for under $20) while others will cost over $200.  Which phone you choose will depend largely on your needs for the cell phone and whether or not you want to use it for more than just GPS tracking.

Once you have one of these phones you are going to want to make sure that you have a good data plan for your phone.  This way you can send data to the 3dtracking servers without incurring exorbitant fees.  Right now, AT&T wireless is offering a unlimited data plan for its phones for $35 a month.  This would put your access to real-time GPS tracking information for your car at roughly $1.17 per day.

3dtracking software

In order to download the free 3dtracking software simply go here.  There are onpage instructions for what to do depending on whether or not you have a Windows-based PDA or a smart phone.  Once you have downloaded the application and installed it on your phone or PDA you will do a brief 3 step application process and will be ready to begin tracking with your cell phone right away.

Total Cost to You

The startup cost of this GPS tracking system for cars can be pretty steep, coming in at over $400 if you buy some of the higher end equipment.  With a $35 unlimited data plan that would bring the first year total out of pocket expense to somewhere between $800 and $900.  The second year of operation would be $420.  While this certainly isn’t cheap, if you already have the GPS navigation unit and the compatible cell phone you won’t need to spend any money out of pocket so your expense will probably be $0 unless you have to upgrade the data plan on your phone to handle the load.  Free GPS tracking is certainly better than not free GPS tracking.

What Will You Track?

From where I sit there are two main applications for this type of GPS tracking system for cars.  They are tracking a teen driver and snooping on a spouse suspected of cheating.  For the former you should be completely up front and honest with your teen about what you are doing to their phone and why you are doing it.  They should know that you are concerned about their safety and that you want to make their driving experience as safe as possible.  Then you should work on some sensible rewards and punishments for your teen drivers.  Making sure they they buy into your GPS tracking system is key if it is going to be useful to them and to you.

IF you are tracking a spouse that you suspect of cheating you should not let them know that you are tracking them.  To do this, you might have to buy a special phone that you put in their car for them so that they don’t realize what is going on.  You will have to leave the phone on and recharge the battery often, but the ability to know if they are cheating or not can certainly be worth the price.

But this set-up, especially one where your phone has GPS capabilities built in, can be used in many more applicaitons.  A few of them are to:

There are practically as many things that you can do with this technology as you can dream up, so sit down, grab a beer, and dream.  This GPS tracking system for cars is definitely going to blow your mind if you let it.

Free GPS Tracking Applications and Software

You can get GPS tracking for free. There are a couple of different ways to get real-time tracking for your family, friends, or co-workers, but the vast majority of them have something to do with cell phones. Below is a list of several different free GPS tracking services that you can take a look at and decide which one is going to work best for you and your family.  Not all these free applications are available on all mobile devices, so be sure to look at the specific application’s compatible device list to see if your cell phone can run this free GPS tracking software.

InstaMapper – Cell Phone Tracking Made Simple

InstaMapper is a free cell phone tracking application available for download and installation on a cell phone. Getting an account is free and only takes a minute or two (be sure to have a valid email address ready for the registration process). After registering you will install an application on your cell phone that is going to provide all the tracking data. This application, when running, will periodically send the phone’s GPS coordinates to InstaMapper servers where they will compile the data for your own use.

Once your GPS coordinates are there, you can login to your account and see your location on an interactive Google map. This can be great for finding your way around a new place or figuring out exactly how to get someplace (this does require that your cell phone have internet access).  Also, if you want your family or friends to know where you are you can give them the login credentials to your account or you can embed a map of your location on a web property (such as a web page, blog, or Facebook profile). Alternatively, you could send them a link that will take them to a map on the InstaMapper website that will look like this.

This free application also lets you record 100,000 locations per mobile phone, organizing them into different tracks and exported in a variety of formats. This volume of locations is equivalent to several months of 24/7 tracking! Now that is a lot from a completely free GPS tracking application.

This is a very powerful application for anyone looking to let other know about their position in the world. Here is a list of compatible phones for this application.

If you are interested in this option, you should really consider looking at to get one of the many Boost Mobile cell phones that are compatible with these devices. According to the InstaMapper website, data plans can run as little as $0.35 per day, which comes out to around $11 per month, making it one of the most economical GPS tracking devices ever – and with an anticipated battery life of 8-12 hours this has many different potential uses for people and for companies.

If you are going be using this cell phone GPS tracking to monitor a teen driver, to check up on a cheating spouse, to monitor workers while they operate company vehicles, or just to get a better picture of where you have been or are at in the world then InstaMapper should be a very strong candidate for your GPS tracking needs.

3dtracking – Bringing GPS Tracking To PDAs

3dtracking is another application that can be downloaded for cell phones that can provide real-time GPS tracking, but unlike the InstaMapper application this is also available on a range of PDAs. For devices that are compatible with this software see their list of compatible devices.

Being an application compatible with PDAs, it lets you integrate a GPS device that you already own (like an automobile navigation unit like a Garmin Nuvi 760) with a web-enabled or cell phone PDA.  This can be extremely useful for those that already own these devices and who want to take advantage of one of the many free GPS tracking apps out there.

Here is a mock-up combination of devices from the 3dtracking website:

A possible example of a set-up for using 3dtracking is a Windows Pocket PC device (such as an Ipaq) that is used with a GPS receiver (Bluetooth or wired). The application will obtain the GPS data from the receiver and then transmit it back to our servers (if your device is both a phone and a PDA (e.g. the i-Mate/Qtek range of products) then it can connect via GPRS. If not, you can transmit all your data to our servers when you sync your PDA to your computer). Once on our servers, you can log in at any time to see your traveled route on either Google Earth or Google Maps. Just select your starting date and time, as well as your end date and time, and our systems will show you exactly where traveled and your speeds along the way.

You can make this data available to other people in a similar fashion to InstaMapper: you can give someone the login credentials to your account or you can put a map on a web property that you own.  However, it does appear that in order to put your map up on a website you must be able to edit information in the <head> html section of the webpage.  This is not possible on websites like Facebook, MySpace, or WordPress.com.  It is possible on Blogger, a self hosted WordPress blog, or a static html page that you might create.

In the end, this is an adequate system if you already have one of the devices mentioned on the list – but if you are just starting out and don’t own a device yet you might want to give InstaMapper a shot if you want to share your position data with someone else.

Mologogo – A Free Social Cell Phone Tracking GPS

Mologogo is like the Facebook of free GPS tracking applications for cell phones.  You can access the location of yourself or your friends from your phone or the web, giving you a quick picture of where everyone is at any given moment of the day.  This is great for people who are constantly on the go and love to keep their friends close.  You can get alerts when people on your friends list are close to you, or you can search to see if your friends are around a certain point of interest (like the club you are at), and stay updated with local weather and traffic conditions all from the same screen. Mologogo also lets its users engage in mobile chat, so you don’t need to burn up text messages if you don’t have an unlimited plan but want to have a quick conversation with a friend in your area.

Mologogo also lets you interact with all this data from a PC.  You can get a picture of where your friends are at at that very moment, you can add new friends to your account, and you can even show your location on your own webpage or blog (just like InstaMapper and 3dtracking).  Your ability to engage with others via your position information with this free cell phone tracking application is pretty phenomenal and offers something that neither of the two previously mentioned applications are able to provide as easily.  This is definitely the most social of all the GPS tracking apps I have seen.

If you want to know if your phone is compatible with this application then you should take a look at the following compatible phone list.  What this list essentially includes is any Nextel, Sprint, or Boost Mobile phones that is able to support Java and also has a GPS receiver installed. Mologogo is also able to be used on Blackberries, Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phones, and SmartPhones on any mobile provider as long as there is an external or internal GPS with the device.

The social aspect of Mologogo is really the best thing about it.  If you want to use your cell phone as a GPS tracking device for the purpose of connecting with your friends then there is no better application on the market.  But it does lack some of the useful features that make InstaMapper such a good application for a wide range of applications.  You simply cannot go wrong with Mologogo if you just want to stay connected to your friends.

LiveTracker – A Blackberry GPS Tracking App In Beta

LiveTracker is currently in beta development and is only available for Blackberry devices. It is still free, so users of the Blackberry should definitely consider using this free software on their phones.  One main perk is that you don’t need to register an account to use this software – all you do is download the software from the SkyLab website and install it on your phone. Start running the application and it will begin recording and sending your location coordinates that it gathered via GPS to the LiveTracker servers.

The ability to share locations with this app is still a little limited – you can only send tracking links via EMail, PIN, SMS, and MMS. You cannot currently embed your location like you can with all the other free GPS tracking applications already mentioned. While this is not that big of a deal for some users, embedding is very important to some users. However, since this software is still in beta you have to realize that these are probably features that the developers are planning on implementing at some point.

If you use a Blackberry you still might want to check this out if you are just trying to dabble in what cell phone GPS can provide.  It might not be as cool, powerful, or full featured as InstaMapper, 3dtracking, or Mologogo – but just because it isn’t now doesn’t mean that one day it might be the best app out there.

GeoTrack24 – Free (Limited) GPS Tracking For Phones and Devices

GeoTrack24 offers a free GPS tracking service, but the “free-ness” of this service is rather limited.  A free account will allow you to track one device, allow 1 person to be able to view this data, and has a history of 3 days.  There appears to be no way to share data with others, making it very hard to use this service for very much.  What does make this service unique is that it can be used on a wide range of devices – both cell phones and various GPS tracking devices.  For a full list of compatible devices see their cell phone list and units list.

Because you can use some GPS tracking devices with this service it is something that you might want to consider using, but the limited device history and 1 account makes it severely limited in what it can do.  They do offer some subscription based plans that are relatively inexpensive (rates are quoted in Pounds), but when you can get a similar, but better, service for free on a cell phone from another software package then you should probably consider this service last on your list.

If you just want to do some minimal free GPS cell phone tracking then this software is probably going to be good enough for you.  However, you should definitely consider some of the other applications mentioned here since they offer a higher quality service.

OpenGTS – Consumer Grade Free GPS Fleet Tracking Software

OpenGTS is a free GPS tracking software that is commercial grade.  Its main application is to be used in GPS fleet tracking, but it could be used to help a family monitor the activity of several people or vehicles at the same exact time.  This free software also differs greatly from some of the other applications mentioned above in that it is a server side tracking software – meaning that it is not installed on any device but is instead installed on a computer.   OpenGTS acts like the captain of your GPS tracking device, taking in the information that the device transmits via GPRS.

If you are looking for a short right up of this service you can read more about it at OpenGTS: A Free GPS Fleet Tracking Software.

GolfLogix – Free GPS Tracking Software For Golf Enthusiasts

If you are in the market for a free golf GPS tracking software then you have to check out GolfLogix.  They offer a a free golf GPS application for iPhones and Blackberries.  They don’t currently have a free app for all the different styles of Blackberry, so head on over to their site at GolfLogix to see if your particular flavor is able to run their software.  If you are a Verizon customer, you might be out of luck since this carrier is notorious for not letting people install third party applications on their Blackberries.

…

If you are looking to get free GPS tracking then you are probably going to be looking to the cell phone.  The number of free and useful applications available on these devices makes it a very compelling pick for those interested in getting GPS information in real time to a wide range of interested parties.

Do you have any experience with these free GPS cell phone tracking applications?  We would love to hear about them in the comments section below.