A fleet management solution provider wanted to develop a solution that report any abnormal operating condition of the vehicle, like dangerous driving or crashes. The tracker itself is powered by solar to avoid connection to vehicle battery.
The tracking device is installed in vehicles that ensure adequate sunlight exposure for charging the batteries from solar power. The device has its own onboard accelerometer to detect abnormal motions like sudden brakes, crashes and heavy acceleration. An STM32 MCU with FreeRTOS is used as the main controller. The tracker uses a cellular modem (Ublox SARA) to communicate with the cloud server.
The tracker has an onboard GPS module for location tracking. In case a GPS fix is not achieved, then the location is determined by cell phone tower positioning. The system has a fuel gauge to monitor the battery status and communicate to the cloud application.
Software is designed to collect the location, acceleration and battery status periodically and communicate them to the cloud. The software is heavily optimized to reduce battery consumption. The tracker also supports over the air firmware upgrade from the server. Necessary customization for the bootloader was performed for firmware upgrade.
Hardware was developed using ORCAD tool.
The AWS hosted application allows fleet owners to track their fleet, define geo-fence for their vehicles, generate reports regarding individual drivers score according to the data collected. System also generate alerts on critical events like crashes.
Firmware update for field trackers can also be initiated from the server application.