Bike tracker with the Electron + Asset Tracker

Getting Started
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I’m going to use the Electron plus the Asset tracker to build a bike/longboard tracker, but I have a few things I’d like to get some clarification on from those more knowledgeable than myself.

1.) What information is included when a device like the Electron pings the particle.io server? The way I understand it is there is the last date/time the server heard from the device, but no other information by default. It won’t/can’t tell me for example the cell tower it’s connected to.

2.) What’s the best way to stay within a low power mode where it can wake up when the cloud has data for it? I know some WIFI chips have remote wake, but I’m not experienced with this cell chip. Maybe it’s easier to have the device wake up once an hour and poll the server for any status changes. Or maybe it doesn’t use that much energy/bandwidth to simply leave it on with everything powered off except the microcontroller/cell chip. I’m sure I’ll find some balance that works well, but I’m curious if anyone has any input. Essentially I’d like the device to use as little power/bandwidth as possible and only go into a special “lost” mode when I tell it that I’ve lost it. Aside from the lost mode I imagine I’ll only have it ping the server once a day as a verification that it’s working and to get updated battery status.

3.) How do I hold a message in Particle.IO’s cloud for the device when it wakes up? Or do I need to use some other cloud service/server?

I also haven’t decided how I’m going to put this on my longboard (an Evolve Carbon AT), or on my Mountainbike. Maybe some kind of light that will be dual purpose light plus gps tracker where no one knows it’s a gps tracker.

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Last I heard Deep Sleep consumes 0.14 mA but uses the most data every time it wakes up.

Next firmware release System.Sleep will consume 4mA when sleeping and have minimal data usage when waking from sleep. With System.Sleep you can wake from a Pin change or timer. So you can wake it up every 24 hours or when a button state has changed.

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Thanks. I’m going to wait till the next firmware release and then I’m going to implement a wake every 24 hours to report the battery life.

I’ll either use the Particle.publish() function or maybe push notifications (using Pushover). I haven’t tried either one, but I imagine I’ll need to use both capabilities at some point. The push notifications I’ll use when the device is in “lost” mode. Where it reports when its being moved along with the gps information.

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You can do all that on www.Ubidots.com easily and free. There is a Ubidots library in the online IDE also for examples.

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Does Ubidots provide anything to show multiple devices on the same map? Do you have anything to suggest? Thanks

– Tag ID in Ubidots would do?

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@izeroman You should ask @aguspg about that. He works with Ubidots.

I have never tried that before.

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