Design and construction of a PC based vehicle tracking system via GSM

Nowadays, application areas of vehicle tracking systems have been increasing day by day. By increasing urbanization, however, GPS system cannot provide location information in some places like dense urban, underpass, tunnel and covered garage. Therefore, it causes interruption of the vehicle tracking process. In this thesis, an implementation and application of vehicle tracking system informs about location with GPS coordinates have been realized. In case of interruption of GPS location information for some reason, location can be provided approximately with GSM registration information. The system is real time vehicle tracking system which uses SMS, one of the services supplied by GSM technology. The system has also an analog voltage input. Using this input, it is possible to send fuel level, engine temperature or any kind of analog voltage measurement of the vehicle to the monitoring center instantly. Addition to these, there is an emergency button equipped to the device to send instant location info to the monitoring center. Hence, the system can be used for private security. For the system implementation, MSP430 microcontroller has been used and power consumption of the system has been decreased with this µC. During software developing for the microcontroller, it has been used embedded C programming language. In the scope of this thesis, interface software has been developed in Borland Delphi 7.0 medium in order to display location and other information sent by the vehicle tracking device. By integrating a MapInfo based digital map to this interface software, displaying the location of the vehicle on a map has been provided. By the performance measurement, the activity of the realized system has been proven.