Realtime Geographic Position Logger

Log the geographic position of your(self) mobile phone in real-time for visualization and analytics purposes.

Tech stack

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi. I tested the code using an RPI3. Because RPI3 uses an armv7l architecture, the database container will not run on other machines. However, you may simply use another respository for mysql image.

• Owntracks is an app for iOS that regularly sends geographic coordinates as events to an MQTT broker.

• Docker stack installed in order to spin up different containers with docker-compose. docker-compose is installed by Poetry during environment setup.

• The container running the MQTT broker (running on own Raspberry Pi 3 behind the house router) needs to be accessed from outside using the phone's internet connection. I am using a free dynamic-dns service for domain resolution and traffic redirection to the Raspberry. This is not required for testing within the same local network.

• A .env file located at at the project folder. This will be used both by the mysql container to set up a password and the connector to authenticate against it. The .env file must contain the following keys.

MYSQL_DATABASE=db
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
username_mysql=root
home_lat=0.0 # use your home lat/lon
home_lon=0.0

How to run ?

To install the Python environment you need to run make setup.env. In order to use docker-compose activate the venv environment with . .venv/bin/activate.

docker-compose up should spin of 3 different containers after building them:

• MQTT Broker,
• database
• the connector.

To test it locally, enter the IP address of your host to Owntrack. Each time you trigger a new message from it, you should be able to see the corresponding information on the logs of the MQTT and connector containers.