Ashley’s Trap Hootage

Upon moving to NL last year, I splashed out on a spank new phone, an HTC TyTn II (a.k.a. Kaiser).

One of the delightful untapped resources of this device is the built-in GPS system.

Armed with this device, the fact that I’m a .NET developer for a living, and a unlimited data plan with T-Mobile, I’ve decided to set about developing a 2-part system to display current/historical locations of your handset (and hopefully, by proxy, you as well) as points on a Google Map.

Now, I’m fully aware that there are probably systems already available to do this (I was aware of one I played with using my N95), but I always think that things like this are more fun to try out yourself.

I’ve already successfully interfaced with the GPS hardware on the TyTn, having downloaded MS’s rather good SDK for WM6.

The next part is to make it configurable, and to find some way (likely FTP I guess) of getting the data to the site, then getting the site (likely PHP) to talk to GMaps and give the output we want.

It’ll have support for date/time ranges, and possibly multiple devices.

Check this for latest sources and news.

To show you how far I’ve got so far, a run down of my dev environment:

• VS2K5 running WM6 SDK Professional
• MS Device Emulator V2 (8.0.60801.00)
• WM6 Professional Vanilla ROM
• Microsoft FakeGPS [Simulates presence of GPS device within the emulator]

And now, some screenshots of the reference application in action testing the presence and status of the GPS:

Fake GPS – Rather simple to configure.

My reference app talking to GPS via the API.

And click here for an embedded GMaps example.