Following the van’s journeys
Turning the van’s tracker data into useful trip information.
I’ve been playing with the data from the van’s tracker to get a better picture of where we’ve been and how the van is doing.
The tracker feeds information through Node-RED and MQTT. I’m using that to build a record of journeys in Tape, with things like start and finish points, distances and times. There are still details to refine, but I rather like the idea of having a useful record of our travels without having to fill it all in by hand.
The flow
The vehicle’s tracker sends data into my Traccar server which in turn forwards the data onto a Node-Red instance there is a flow that does a few things including reformatting the data adding the relevant parts to my MQTT broker (well technically one of my MQTT brokers) and triggering a few other flows.\n\nThis may seem long winded but once it is in MQTT the data is available were ever it is needed across sites and Node-red instances for example my Node-Red instance running in the van can pickup the location and pass it into the Victron system as a virtual GPS location.
I am sure I will talk more about how powerful MQTT and Node-Red are in the future as they are both incredibly powerful and at least in ‘general’ IT terms very underused and rated.
Every morning Node-Red makes an HTTP request to the Traccar server to get the previous days ‘trip’ data and then does some location lookups and adds data to Tape via its API\n