GPS locator is also called GPS tracker. At present, most of its application market is in fleet tracking management and control. Below we will introduce what we can do with GPS locator?

1. Use GPS location tracker to locate and track your important items and assets. Let you no longer worry about the loss of items, and no longer worry about your heart.

2. When your student leaves school without authorization, through the GPS locator you can quickly know when your student leaves school and when he comes home – these will be automatic real-time notifications.

3. With the GPS tracker fence alarm function, you can set the object safe area, when a person, vehicle or object enters or leaves any area you choose, the “Geofence” alarm will immediately notify you by text or email. fast and convenient

4. Get the current location of your vehicle or the entire fleet. You will know where the driver has gone and where he is going to go in real time.

5. Worried about your kids or husband driving too fast? Install a GPS tracker in the car, when the car exceeds your limit speed, you can get an alert in time, and you can send a notification immediately to remind the driver to pay attention to safety, isn’t it particularly cool? Even if he is in trouble while driving, he only needs to press the built-in emergency button, and he will be responded and helped within a few seconds.

When purchasing GPS trackers, it is common to see that some suppliers provide devices with plastic shells and metal shells. Some customers can’t help wondering what is the difference between these two kinds of GPS trackers, and which is better and which is worse?

In general, the GPS tracker with metal shell is wear-resistant, heat-resistant and flame-retardan, and its external antenna signal is good, but the device is relatively heavy, which will increase the transportation cost. While the GPS tracker with plastic shell is cold resistant, small in size, light in weight, and well sealed, but easily deformed at high temperatures.

GPS tracker with metal shell, for metal shielding signal reason, can only use external antenna to acquire strong signal, which virtually increased the cost of the product for adding the extra accessories, and because of the metal material is relatively heavier, the international transport cost is higher, but in the high temperature regions, the users had to compromise the cost, and choose the heat-resisting and flame-retardant metal shell in case the device is deformed by high temperature.

If the signal and the ambient temperature are stable, there is no difference in the function and operation between these two kinds of device. Most of users would prefer the GPS tracker with plastic shell, not only because it can be hidden well in vehicle, but also can save much cost in accessories and freight. In addition, the plastic shell can be made waterproof and used in some projects that need it to be placed exposed.

Again, it depends on where your device needs to be used to select the appropriate one based on the characteristics of the shell materials, or you can ask the supplier to recommend the best GPS tracker for you.

When it comes to wearable GPS trackers, the first thing that comes to mind is the common GPS phone watch. These types of trackers usually cost several times more than car trackers. Do you know why? Let’s take a look at the detailed reasons below.

1. Chipset

Let’s say for example, a car GPS tracker is a screenless phone, while a GPS phone watch is a mini version of a smart phone. Normally, car GPS tracker only needs to fulfill the positioning and communication purpose, but GPS phone watch can realize all the features that smart phone has based on android system. As you can imagine, GPS phone watch would request relatively high performance chipset. Meanwhile, because of the size limit of watch, the chipset size should be small enough so to not occupy too much space in PCBA as there are several chipsets like MCU,GPS,GSM,WIFI, Bluetooth, G-sensor, camera, etc. designed in the same board. Generally speaking, high performance while small size chipset would cost more.

2. Screen and camera

GPS phone watch has one more touch screen component than car GPS tracker, which in itself adds to the cost. Due to the fragility of the screen, tempered glass and protective film should also be considered. Considering the waterproof problem, the screen back glue is also very exquisite. Nowadays, with the development of technology, more and more users need video call and photo taking functions, which not only requires clear screen quality, but also increases the cost of the camera. Moreover, the quality requirements of the camera will be updated with the needs of users, and the cost will gradually increase.

3. Antenna

Unlike car GPS trackers, users can attach external antennas, or even for devices with built-in antennas, which have fewer size restrictions and less internal chip interference, making antennas easier to place. The size of GPS phone watches is very small, and there are many different chipsets with antennas in such a small space. If they are not well arranged, they will interfere with each other, their working performance will be very poor and their emission will be high, so it requires the use of high-cost antenna materials and arrangements, such as radium carving.

4. Battery

Car GPS trackers don’t need to worry too much about battery life of their built-in batteries because they can connect to car batteries. But the GPS phone watch is not the same, it can only rely on the internal battery, and most users expect it to last longer time, but it is just its battery size is limited, so it needs to choose a small and high capacity battery, the cost is naturally very high. Moreover, the watch is worn by users for daily use, and the safety of the battery should be fully considered to avoid explosion, burns and other problems. These require a high quality battery, predictably, which would cost higher.

5. Shell Materials and other components

Generally, GPS phone watch will be closely touched with user’s skin, so its materials are very important for the health of human body. In the design process of watch, engineer will also consider material the comfort level as much as possible. As for the requirement of waterproof feature, the mould structure design of the GPS phone watch is quite complicated, the shell production faulty rate is relatively high, it’s not hard to see that the mould cost and unit price of shell materials will be high, Due to there are slots for microphone and speaker, it need to apply it with waterproof breathable membrane, or waterproof accessories, additionally in the production procedure, it will need to apply glue drip process to ensure sealing. So whether it is material selection or production, the cost is very high.

6. APP value-added service

In addition to providing basic functions such as location, alarms and safe zone, the user APP of GPS phone watches also needs to realize more practical functions such as telephone or video call, voice and photograph. The realization of these functions itself requires relatively high researching cost, plus the debugging and verification steps in the later stage, the cost will be higher. Meanwhile, the user APP will also have some additional functions, such as interaction, games, supporting knowledge chain and reading materials, which need a lot of time and labor cost to develop and organize.

In a word, you get what you pay for, and an expensive product must have its value.

If you’re already in the GPS tracker business and want to build your brand locally, you’re probably thinking about how you can talk to suppliers about customizing your product so that you can stand out in front of customers. So what kind of customization can be done for GPS trackers?

GPS tracker is a relatively complex product, which includes hardware and software, so product customization involves hardware customization and software customization. These two aspects refer to a lot of professional knowledge, which we will sort out for you one by one.

1. Customization based on existing GPS tracker or GPS tracking platform.
1) The customization of finished hardware is generally based on the existing product to do some surface technology without changing the shape or mold, such as external label stickers, silk printing or radium carving trademark logo. Or otherwise, to increase the new features based on the existing product firmware, for example, some GPS tracker contains reserved RS232 serial port, these serial ports can be connected to different accessories with RS232 connectors, such as fuel sensor, RFID, camera, scanner and so on. You can imagine when you purchase GPS tracker from supplier A and fuel sensor from supplier B, and later you want to integrate them together which is a kind of customization that the GPS tracker supplier A should program their firmware to compatible with the fuel sensor provided by supplier B.

2) The other situation is that you only request slightly change in the PCBA design of the hardware to achieve the features and the mold has more room so you don’t need to change it, In addition to redesigning the PCBA, this process must also involve rewriting firmware code, which may refer to some researching cost.
3) The customization of the GPS tracking platform is mostly based on the existing platform, such as customizing login interface and domain name, adding reports, integrating maps, integrating protocols, integrating email, integrating SMS API, and other functions that can be triggered by the platform. Some of the customization like data transfer between servers and application development based on the API of the platform, which would request your own engineers and supplier’s to work together.

2. Develop a brand new GPS tracker
1) Generally if you need to change the mold of the product, even it’s small change, it is equivalent to develop a brand new product. In this case, you need to follow the certain procedure as below and ask supplier to offer you quotation accordingly.
a) ID (Industry Design) and MD (Mechanical) design;
b) Hardware (PCBA) and Software (Firmware) design;
c) Project management (Coordinate designers, engineers, mold production and product manufacturing arrangements until finished product comes out);
d) Sourcing (Evaluate and audit suppliers of materials, price negotiating)
e) QA (Ensure product quality)
2) The workload of developing a new tracking software platform is also huge. It usually goes through five stages as following.
a) Software definition and planning. In this stage, it mainly determine the goals and feasibility
b) Requirements analysis. In the case of determining the feasibility of software development, detailed requirements analysis is carried out for each function that the software needs to achieve.
c) Software design. According to the results of demand analysis, the whole software system is designed, such as system framework design, database design and so on
d) Program coding. This stage is to translate the results of software design into computer executable program code.
e) Software testing. After the program coding is completed, rigorous testing should be carried out to find existing problems and correct them.

As the developing of the technology and improvement of public security, GPS tracker was widely used in our daily life for protecting pet, beloved person, small precious stuffs and big valuable asset. If you have rough idea about it, know how it works, it would help you a lot in your life.

GPS tracker is not a navigation device, while it is a kind of device that can let you know where it is. If a person wears it, we know where he/she is, if a vehicle installed it, we know where it was going. 

A GPS tracker usually consists of three main parts such as GPS module, GSM module and MCU. GPS module is for getting location data from satellite, GSM module is for transferring data to server so that people can check the information via PC or mobile phone, and MCU is for processing the data.

GPS tracker can be categorized as wireless tracker and wiring tracker, wireless tracker like GPS phone watch, student card, hand hold tracker, magnetic tracker and so on are usually used for person, pet, and asset including vehicles; wiring tracker are mainly for vehicles. Wiring tracker generally have more complicated features than wireless tracker, anyhow, the main features of them are similar. For example, Real-time Tracking, Safe Zone (we also call it GEO-fence), Alarms(such as emergency, over speed, falling down, etc.), remotely control, make calls, pedometer (or Mileage meter), etc..

Before we are using GPS tracker mainly for safety purpose and effective management, now it has penetrated into every corners of our life. When you go outside, you can call a sharing taxi or rent a sharing car at once; when you are hungry, you call take-out immediately, when your phone’s battery low, you can rent a power bank fast, and when you don’t want to walk for short distance travel, you can rent a sharing bike right away, when you take a bus, you have no need to wait in bus station any more, you can check the exact arrive time of the bus and casually step forward it in time, when it rains, you will never worry about forgetting your umbrella, you can rent a sharing umbrella soonest, and so on and so forth. All of the applications mentioned above are related to GPS tracker, we have to say that the GPS tracker has totally changed our life at present.