The Challenge:
track the bicycles of the center while maintaining ownership of the collected data
The Result:
a tracking hardware device made from scratch
The Joint Research Center of the European Commission (also known as JRC) needed to equip the bicycles of the center, freely usable in the perimeter, with a position tracking system to facilitate their retrieval and maintenance.
The center is spread over an area of 168 hectares and has 36 km of internal roads. It is located in Ispra, a town in the province of Varese on the Lombard shore of Lake Maggiore, in Italy.
The normal trackers on the market, of Asian origin, transmit data on Chinese servers, whose reliability and availability over time is strongly questioned.
In light of this criticality, the main needs have been identified
Sending data to an internal system, hosted on an internal server
Use of the European Galileo positioning network
Personalized and continuous assistance
GaraGeeks developed the tracker hardware and firmware, thus ensuring the first two requirements. The positioning is based on a high-performance GNSS module from the Austrian company u-blox. The microcontroller is the proven ATMEGA328PB. Thanks to special energy saving techniques, the autonomy of the internal battery is about 90 days. A method was subsequently studied to recharge the buffer battery starting from the e-bike battery, thus eliminating a periodic operation.
The data is saved on a proprietary server with an open source platform, capable of managing even thousands of devices and widely used in large projects.
Having designed and built the units from scratch allows us to offer assistance from start to finish.
The experience gained in the project now allows us to offer our Tracking Platform on the market, which is also capable of monitoring the temperature of cold rooms in real time to protect the cold chain from any breakdowns or tampering.