There are two main ways of performing outdoor location when tracking sensor devices in a large area such as a city. The most extended is using a GPS module to get the information sent by the satellites on the 1575MHz band and extract all the information possible (latitude, longitude, speed, direction). However, this methodology is not effective when requiring mobile scenarios where the nodes can change from a clear environment to an indoor one, such as going inside buildings, garages and tunnels. For this cases we use the information provided by the Mobile Phone Cells (Cell ID, RSSI, TA) which is captured by the GPRS module. Read the complete article.

When monitoring risk situations it is important to be able to generate alarms in real time and in the same place where the parameter is detected. For this scenarios the ideal solution is to send a SMS directly to the secutity forces such as fireman brigade or policy. This article shows how to use the GPRS/GSM communication module for SquidBee and configure it to send SMS's in the same time it happens.