Asset Tracker - options when no cell service

I’ve only been able to find bits and pieces and was hoping to find something that would keep me from re-inventing the wheel etc.

I’ve an Asset tracker V2 that logs to one of the map plugins for grafana - which works fairly well - and encountered an issue I was hoping wouldn’t come up (though shouldn’t have been surprised) while on an offroading trip where we lost all cell coverage.

The obvious answer (aside from setting up my own cell towers) is to log the data and publish/send it later - the idea isn’t all about real-time logging, but real-time when possible.

I’ve been using @rickkas7’s library/project with very minor changes but the sleep parts are a bit tricky for me (my coding skills are fairly basic - no pun intended). Between that and the best logic to use, I’m trying to figure on the best route. My thought was maybe rather than trying to combine two publishing methods, just always log the data to the logger (just using an openlog board from sparkfun), and send whatever hasn’t already been sent. This could lead to a fair amount of data building up that would need to be flushed out, but I can imagine some logic there to make sure that things get mapped in order for me to look at later.

As for the sleeping part - which may be more me just streaming thought here - my thought is to have it not sleep when the vehicle is running and then go to sleep when it isn’t. This is intended to be for ‘trips’ vs every day usage, so the sleep mode for this is really just for quick gps acquisition.

The trip I went on stopped (according to the map) and then just picked up when we got back in range, so there’s a nice straight line several hundred miles long across some rather tall mountains if you catch my drift :wink:

Anyone done something closer to this? I’ve also got a boron LTE - though I’m not impressed with the range, and I have a boron 3g on order (considering some of the mesh stuff for vehicle use - down the road).

Can you be a bit clearer about what exactly you want to achieve here?

Regular GPS position acquisition logged to an SD card and then later transmitted when in cellular range - if in cellular range then transmitted immediately. Device should sleep between regular (timed) position acquisition if vehicle is not powering the device and it is running on Lipo battery. Does that summarize your requirement?

That about sums it up - though I was still thinking an interval of some sort (TBD) when in range so I don’t chew up too much data. When in sleep (vehicle off), the frequency of checks could be hours really.

At some point it might be desirable to detect on motion (if someone’s stealing my car - or its getting towed…), but that can wait :slight_smile: