GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog » Identifying and eliminating speeding

Apr 22 2009

Scionverate Redux

Category: Alerts,Arizona,EZ-1000,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Mapping — rdonat @ 9:05 pm

I got an odd-hours alert for our GPS Insight Scion (the wrapped vehicle we use to do advertising, occasional installs, etc.).

One of our employees took it home tonight, which is fine — miles & miles of cheap advertising since he lives far away from the office.

Except they’re speeding so I looked online to see what’s going on. (I also got a speeding alert…)

The Scion has 3 units installed — a 3500, a 4000, and a 3000. The “Scion” vehicle is the 3500, at 2 minute updates, and the others are at 1 minute updates.

This was a pretty interesting distribution of whereabouts on the 60 heading West, all speeding, but nicely spaced out between location reports:

I just thought I would share, it looked interesting.

FYI, the “out of range” “Pedestrian” units are our EZ-1000′s — when you turn them off, to save on battery, they rightfully go “out of range” – since we only have a few for testing on our account, they are all turned off at night, since we’re not out patrolling the mall, etc…

A few minutes later, the 3 units in the Scion are still equally spread out — this time Alena is in chase. I’m guessing she’s trying to catch up to her husband, who is driving home from wherever they met for dinner together…

And here we go, the culprit is…. Grant, stopped finally at Grant House.

[The night after I wrote this article, 3 of our installers are driving the Scion to coordinate a large install in California together, and one has an EZ-1000 with him (don’t ask me why he named it ‘Ghost Rider’ — I have no idea). Now there are 4 different types of tracking device in the Scion, all together, again all speeding… That’s California though, they’re probably getting passed left & right.

Here’s a picture of the 4 units, off by just a bit time/reporting-wise, all in an alert mode. Bear in mind the speeds are slightly different due to them having different 1-2 minute sample timeframes:

Rob.

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Apr 12 2009

EZ-1000 works in luggage in planes & trunks!

Category: Arizona,California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,EZ-1000,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Package Tracking — rdonat @ 11:12 am

I forgot to turn off an EZ-1000 I had brought on a trip. It was in my overhead luggage (oops).

It still tracked me on the runway (a max speed of 214 until it lost signal), then all the way home while in my trunk.

Run a quick 3D map for Friday:

We took off on time (3:35 flight pushed back at exactly 3:35 & left the runway at 3:40):

Then the unit last reported before losing cell coverage at 214 MPH after turning over the ocean:

I was out of cell range for roughly an hour, and covered 330 miles between Orange County, CA and Phoenix, AZ which means we averaged about 330 MPH:

All of our units except for this one (the EZ-1000) would store that history, but the EZ-1000 is more about where a person is right now (e.g. security guards, police officers) so it does not store data if it loses cell coverage — since we rarely lose cell coverage (except in planes at 33,000 feet…) it’s a non-issue, as you’ll see next.

After landing, it picks right up again, then tracks my vehicle all the way home, even though I had the unit in my suitcase, in my closed metal trunk:

And on the freeway, it is exactly accurate (but at 2 minute updates) relative to my GPSI-4000 at 10 second updates in the same vehicle (red line=10 second with the GPSI-4000, blue line = 2 minutes with the EZ-1000):

Here on the highway there are 2 points 4 seconds apart, with the same exact speed (67 MPH):

The points are 56 feet apart, which seems reasonable for 4 seconds at 67 MPH (technically it should be 393′ but the 1000 takes a couple seconds to transmit vs. the 4000 which is pretty much instant — but close enough– we’re not launching missiles here):

The moral of the story here is that this unit can be used to economically supplement your tracking of freight, high value packages, etc. Just Thursday a customer I visited in El Monte asked if he could use them to track shipments — Given the fact that my trunk is probably thicker metal than the typical trailer, I can say that it should work reasonably well.

Remember these units work for up to 10-15 days in “ping only” mode, and 3 1/2 days at 2 minute updates. Inexpensive external USB-connected batteries work well to extend the life up to a month or two.

This device is very reliable, and easy to use for many security, freight tracking, and occasional tracking needs. Just don’t ask us to sell it to you to track your spouse or kids — we strictly sell for B2B (Business to Business).

Here’s one more picture of the 2 minute EZ-1000 tracking (blue with green movement/speeding dots) vs. “reality” at 10 second updates (red) — it caught me speeding… I wanted to get home in a hurry obviously:

Thanks,

Rob.

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Mar 23 2009

Banana Boat Tracking with GPS Insight’s EZ-1000

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Driver Accountability,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Mapping,Mexico — rdonat @ 11:35 pm

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

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Mar 23 2009

About to process our 100 MILLIONTH Alert Check

Category: Alerts,Identifying and eliminating speeding,New Features — rdonat @ 8:06 pm

We have been processing user defined alerts for over a year, and prior to that would set them up as custom alerts for customers.

I was curious how many have been processed so far, and we are less than 2 days or so from processing our 100 millionth alert:

Yet they are still relatively un-used by our customers.

Here is how you access your alerts, which are an integral part of managing by proactive exception using GPS Insight:

This opens up our account’s alerts (we have a HUGE number of them since we test using our own vehicles all the time — I get 100 emails/SMS text messages a day about our employees speeding, getting to the office, leaving the office, idling (rare, we’re office workers, not service technicians…), etc.

Even if I leave my car at the car wash & forget about it… (documented here).

Here are the alerts, and if you “hover over” the “info” (i) you can see information about how many times it’s been checked (generally once per minute) and how many times you’ve been alerted (in this case 538 times when one of our employees went > 90 MPH — we do a lot of driving back & forth through the desert to/from Southern California — hopefully the 5th amendment prevents us from getting in trouble over this…). Also, bear in mind that we sometimes test this alert by artificially dropping it down to 55 MPH, plus many of our vehicles report at 10 second updates — this over-inflates that number of alerts (but that many emails/SMS text messages were sent on this alert being “tripped.”).

You can see that we have 7 types of alerts currently. Bear in mind that a Geofence is the same thing as a “Landmark” or “Site” in GPS Insight.

Geofence Alert: Any time a vehicle enters/exits a defined Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Geofence Stop Alert: A stop for longer than a defined period of time inside or outside a given Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Idle Time Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s engine is left running for greater than a configurable number of minutes without moving

Odd-Hours Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle is driven during a specified period of time

Odd-Hours in Landmark: Alerts when a vehicle is driven but only inside or outside of a Landmark (or group of Landmarks/Geofences)

Speeding Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s max or average speed (you choose) exceeds a specific threshold (you choose)

Speeding Alert in Landmark: Same as a Speeding Alert but within a specific landmark — this is good for construction zones or “trouble areas” you define

We have several new alerts coming online soon, and will be able to allow you schedule what time/days you want alerts to come within the week.

These do not include Maintenance Alerts which are separate and maintained under “Scheduled Maintenance” within GPS Insight.

As always, if there is an alert you would like to see, please let us know — there’s a good chance we’re already working on it or will add it to our list of alerts to add, and usually they come within a week or two, not “sure, we’ll get that for you…”

Rob.

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Jul 01 2008

GPS Insight employees speed (and get tickets) too…

Category: Driver Accountability,Identifying and eliminating speeding — rdonat @ 9:48 pm

On the way home from a client visit in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, both Josh and I were heading back on 294.

Here is how we can pull a speed history (bear in mind since I’m logged in with a Phoenix account, times are in MST — if Josh were logged in it would show his stop at 8:42, not 6:42):

See Josh stop:

See Josh speed:

See Josh pull over for 6 minutes, get a ticket, then start obeying the speed limit again:

See Josh’s Ticket (the officer was nice and dropped it to 75 from 80 to save him $20):

Note the time is slightly off (1:32 PM vs. 1: 35 (11:35 with 2 hours of timezone adjustment)) — our times are from the satellites & definitive — her watch is a little off.

I was just ahead of him in a rental (no tracking…) and am glad I wasn’t doing 80 when I passed her…

Doh!

Sorry Josh, slow down next time!

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, speeding

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