GPS Insight Blog » GPSI-4000

Jul 29 2011

New Timestamps in Garmin Dispatch/Messaging Module

Category: Driver Accountability,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,New Features,New Features,New Garmin Features — rdonat @ 11:44 am

With our new timestamp functionality you can now check the time a Garmin Message or Dispatch Item (stop) was:

Sent by Dispatch or GPS Insight automatically or via text
Delivered to the Garmin
Viewed by the Driver
Accepted by the Driver
Marked as complete by the driver

Here’s how:

The other day I Dispatched myself by texting “gps rob dis robhouse” which is short for “gps [rob 4000] [dispatch] [landmark named robhouse].”

Here are the timestamps of each of the status changes (available under the “Custom->Garmin” menu):

View Garmin Dispatch Status Change Timestamps in GPS Insight

Note all I need to do is “hover over” the “Done” status at the end of the Message field, and the date-stamped statuses are visible.

After dispatching myself at 4:09, it instantly appeared as a stop on my Garmin.

I saw it, but then drove a bit so it would have a different timestamp when it became “active”, at 4:10, as I was about to turn North onto Scottsdale Road. Note the change to “Active” at 4:10. Here is where everything happened, after running a 3D history like this:

Run a 3D Map History for a day for my vehicle

Leaving Work, accepting a stop to go home

It took me until 16:18, and 5.8 miles to get home, where I was prompted by the Garmin to mark that stop as “complete” (we shorten it to “Done”):

Getting home and marking the stop as "complete"

Even if I didn’t mark the stop as complete, we still have the timestamp of when I reach that landmark available in the landmark report, and will eventually incorporate all of this information into a single “dispatch report” which allows our customers to get a single-stop summary of all their Garmin dispatch activity.

Here’s how to run that landmark report:

Running a GPS Insight Landmark Report

Note that our “1 day” landmark report extends backward and forward automatically to show you how long the vehicle was there prior to LEAVING (if it started the day in that landmark) and how long it stayed there through the end of the stop, if it was parked there at the end of the day. These are the kind of “nice to have” features our customers (and we) insist on, so we provide it.

You can easily tell I left (late for the day, really…), then forgot something, came back, then left, and eventually came back, precisely at the same 4:18 PM time I marked the stop complete via the Garmin interface:

Times in and out of my house, matching the Garmin "Done" timestamp

At least I left early the next day to make up for it — 6:22 AM.

This new capability is very helpful for proving service to a customer, determining how quickly your drivers react to dispatch items, and other investigations about your drivers’ daily activity.

Enjoy!

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, garmin dispatch, Garmin Timestamps, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, Vehicle Tracking

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Sep 05 2010

How to not forget things and get in trouble with your wife…

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Garmin Integration,Garmin Messaging,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000 — rdonat @ 2:34 pm

I was working yesterday (and today) and my wife sent me an email to pick some stuff up from the grocery store.

Email asking me to get things from the store

I knew I would forget & get home, & have to drive back, so here’s what I did:

Send myself a reminder to go to the store via Garmin Message to my car

Here’s what I sent only 2 minutes after getting the email:

Modern day GPS Insight "ribbon tied on my finger"

This means when I get in my car, the Garmin will be beeping at me, with this message, and I won’t get home and forget.

Here’s what the Garmin screens looked like:

I have a message waiting for me

Click on it for the full message

Full message to remind me to go to the store

And did I remember?

Yep, and I can pull up a stop report to show it:

Run a stop report for "Rob" vehicle for yesterday

Note the 24 minute stop near the grocery store:

24 minute stop at the store to get groceries

Why did it take me 24 minutes to get 7 things?

Because I need GPS in a supermarket — I made 5 trips from aisle 1 to aisle 20 — I have no idea where anything is & am worthless in a grocery store.

That would be a very useful product for guys like me.

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking systems, garmin dispatch, garmin integration, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, messaging, Vehicle Tracking

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May 01 2010

New Route Creation/Sending to Garmin capability

Category: Garmin Integration,GPSI-4000,Mapping,New Features,Routing — rdonat @ 2:10 pm

Now if you have Garmin integrated into your GPS Insight implementation, you can optimize a list of addresses or landmarks, then send that entire route via wireless to your driver’s Garmin on his or her dashboard. It’s this easy:

Route a Set of Addresses to a Garmin as well as Add Landmarks to a Route

A route made from a list of addresses, and some landmarks, can be sent to a Garmin. Using the Route Dashlet, addresses can be pasted to create a list of destinations that are not yet landmarked:

Additional destinations for the route can be added from the list of landmarks on the account:

An optimized route is then created by clicking Get Route:

The Route is sent to the specified Garmin by selecting the vehicle with an attached Garmin and clicking Send:

If you would like to look at the route, you can click on “Map This” to show it on a map and adjust/email it if necessary:

Once you “Send” the route to a Garmin, the NUMBERED stops show up with the Route Name for you to easily determine where to go and in what order. You may call them “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. in order to help distinguish. Note that they should not be a very long name since Garmin screens aren’t always wide enough to show the full name (as in the case with my small, inexpensive Nuvi 205).

Here are screen shots of the Garmin when it receives the route:
The “Stop” icon shows up and the Garmin “dings” to let you know you have a new stop (or multiple stops). Click on it to show your stops in numbered order:

Then, you can click on the one you want to go to (ideally in the order specified, or based on whichever one is closest to your existing location (which is shown in the right column) [note I had to edit the image since my nuvi didn't have enough space for the full number -- why you should buy a W model (which stands for widescreen)]:

After clicking on it with your finger, you get more details, and can choose to “Go” there at this point:

At that point, the Garmin will take you there with turn by turn audible and visible instructions. If you have a Traffic enabled Garmin, it will optimize for existing traffic.

Note that addresses, latitude/longitude, and Landmarks may be combined within the GPS Insight route dashlet.

This is a real time-saver and using GPS Insight to get the route order optimized will absolutely save you miles — 5-10% is reasonable, and more if your dispatcher really doesn’t have a way to visualize the order on a map.

Down the road, we will start allowing customers to save routes & compare the route SENT to the actual route DRIVEN.

Bear in mind that the GPS Insight GPSI-4000 and newly introduced GPSI-3900 are our 2 Garmin capable devices.

Click for more information on our Garmin Integration.

Rob.

Tags: dispatch, garmin integration, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, Routing

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Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Fleet Tracking,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,Safety,Trimble — rdonat @ 2:50 pm

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, landmark reporting, unauthorized usage, using vehicles to buy crack, Vehicle Tracking

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Aug 16 2009

Live Garmin Dispatch Demo (REALLY FAST DISPATCH!)

Category: Garmin Integration,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000 — rdonat @ 12:41 pm

This is a quick camera video I took to show just how fast messages make it to the GPS Insight Navigation solution using Garmin.

I simulate a dispatch event using an SMS text message from my iPhone, which sends both a “dispatched stop” (to GPS Insight Headquarters) in the form “gps rob dis headq” (which is short for “dispatch GPS Insight Headquarters”). Then I send a text message using “gps rob gm hi there”and “gm” is short for “Garmin Message.” You can see it takes literally less than a second to receive the message, and about 2-3 seconds to receive the dispatch (the “lag” is due to the text messaging infrastructure but 2-3 seconds is pretty good regardless).

Here is the video, and below it, I will show how a customer would “typically” send a message or next stop to a driver.

Here is the message I sent back using the Garmin in the demo (visible here in the Garmin message history):

There is another Garmin demonstration here for a more thorough look at how the Garmin Integration with GPS Insight works. This video is to really show the solution “in action” to illustrate how quick and powerful it is for dispatch oriented organizations.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Aug 09 2009

Switches and Sensors in GPS Insight

Category: GPSI-4000,New Features,Switches — rdonat @ 12:12 pm

We have been doing a lot of work with switches and sensors lately on our GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 line.

In addition to inputs (panic button, when a garbage truck empties a can, when emergency lights are on in an ambulance, etc.), we have been doing work on outputs lately as well.

While we are fairly reluctant to support “remote vehicle shutoff” due to liability reasons, we will work with certain customers on supporting outputs to do any range of things:

Disable the vehicle’s starter (unless an authorized driver swipes in)
Disable the vehicle’s fuel pump (if a vehicle is stolen or idling too long)
power a buzzer or light for the following:
- Speeding
- Idling
- Forgot to sign in using a Driver ID card/keyfob
- On demand from dispatch

Basically, using outputs allows us to turn something on or off remotely, using relays. Since we don’t want customers accidentally wiring them wrong and stranding their drivers, we will be supporting this closely and only occasionally.

Anyway, here is a quick video of this in action, showing a couple of lights which depict the remote switches being turned on or off. Click on the photo to download a .mov (Quicktime from my iPhone) to view. If you don’t have Quicktime, sorry –just trust that we remotely change one light to turn off, and the other to turn on. The iPhone .mov is sideways if I try to create a blog-compatible .flv, so hopefully you can view this ok.

This is in our development lab where we are constantly pushing the envelope on how to make our products work for customer requirements.

This generally requires some sort of custom work for the customer, and a familiarity with the customer’s requirements, so we will limit this type of work where appropriate. But we have this capability now and can use it for custom requirements where security or other custom requirements are necessary and a big concern.

Rob.

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May 30 2009

Rob gets a speeding ticket — GPS Insight proves the speeding activity unfortunately…

Category: Arizona,cell phone capabilities,Driver Accountability,EZ-1000,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPSI-4000,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Mapping,Routing — rdonat @ 1:41 pm

So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…

On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).

Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.

I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.

I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.

My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.

Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:

Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:

I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:

I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.

It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):

So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.

On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:

A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:

41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.

I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.

Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…

Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.

Rob.

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May 16 2009

New Switch Capabilities in GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Fleet Tracking,Google Earth,GPSI-4000,Mapping,New Features,Reporting,Switches — rdonat @ 12:35 pm

GPS Insight now offer switches to its customers using the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 models of tracking device.

These are useful if you want to count and quantity where certain activity takes place, such as:

solid waste collection (tipping a can into the garbage truck)
pump activity (pumping a well, concrete, etc.)
street sweeper on vs. off activity

There are countless uses for switches, and we will go through them in future articles.

Here are some pictures of the new capability within GPS Insight for a residential solid waste operation which recently put GPS Insight on its vehicles. These are the “sideloaders” for the day (which pick up curbside cans):

We have a new “All Inputs” option for what to show in 3D Mapping — the path of each vehicle is shown in a different color, but the actual pickups are shown as green or blue dots with stars (depending on speed):

To isolate JUST the pickup activity or JUST the driving activity, put a polygon in place to show the dots like a cornrow, or turn off the time slider to show just the path:

But if all you want to do is count “tips” just run a summary report — here is the how:

Zooming in:

All in .28 seconds. Lots of information, and quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive to obtain. We have other reports available which we will go into with future articles (e.g. idling when PTO is NOT engaged, etc.).

Now when Mrs. Smith at 123 N. Main Street says you didn’t pick up her garbage on time, you’ll know what happened.

Rob.

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May 16 2009

Identifying mis-wired GPS tracking devices with a stop graph

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,GPSI-4000,Miscellaneous,reduced idling,Reporting — rdonat @ 12:01 pm

When we subcontract out installations, we want to make sure they were done right electrically. 6 of our devices are either “Plug and Play” or “Lick and Stick” (they just glue to the top of the trailer) but some require actual installation into the vehicle’s electrical system. We can help with easy “wire taps” so you don’t need to do much work, but often times the customer will ask us to do the install or we subcontract it out.

So, after a joint installation of 65 or so devices recently, we ran a quick report to make sure every unit was reporting properly.

A minute to run the report & we could see 2 things immediately:

One unit did not have its “switched power” lead properly wired in the vehicle, since it shows as idling (blue) throughout the night vs. red or white (which indicate stops between 1-8 hours and 8+ hours):

The top circled item shows this mis-wired vehicle. We will just need to have our installer make a quick adjustment & we will be 100% on these 65 units.

Toward the bottom, we see an actual overnight idle stop — amazingly, some times, drivers leave the vehicle running, then go home for the night, and the next morning find the truck has wasted 15 gallons of fuel, caused 15 hours of pollution, etc.

A GPS Insight Idle Alert to both the supervisor and the driver will stop that, as well as this report or one of our other idle-detecting/quantifying alerts.

Rob.

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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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