About GSM project

Haresh,

Your request was just fine. The problem is that many newsgroups are populated with people who 1) want to make a joke about your request, or

2) want to sound so knowledgeable that you request is just an irritation.

--

From what you have described, you want the the 8051 to manage the data flow between the GPS and the GSM modem.

There are many variations of the 8051. Some have two serial ports. Using one of those would save you time. Try the SiLabs 8051F344 development kit which comes with a prototype board and a debugger + programming tools.

Set up one serial port (baud rate, and format) to talk to the GPS. Setup the other serial port to drive the GSM modem. Start you programming by working with the GPS port. Develop code to pull in the GPS messages. Then adjust those messages into the format needed. Develop code to establish and close a connection with the GSM modem. Then connect all of the pieces together.

Most of the work will involve setting up the 8051 hardware to host your application. The newer 8051's are feature rich and need a lot of initialization code to setup the part for use. Study the data sheet extensively and read as many software examples as you can. No matter how good your application is, if you do not setup the hardware correctly, you will have problems ranging from erratic behavior to just plain dead.

From an application viewpoint, I would use an interrupt to service each serial port receive data. Toss the data into a small circular buffer and then to all processing and messaging in the foreground.

As someone suggested, ww2.8052.com is a good resource. There are quick solutions. You will have to read a lot. There is much to know to make this type of project a success.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

B. Farmer

Many here will be happy to answer specific questions but the questions need to include sufficient detail regarding the statement of the problem and the design constraints that it's even *possible* to form an answer.

--
Rich Webb     Norfolk, VA

That should read No Quick Solutions.,

His request was *not* fine. It was written in barely comprehensible pseudo-english (I am a Scot living in Norway - I am fully aware of the difficulties of learning and communicating in a second language. But I also know that if you can't speak or write a language reasonably, you're going to have a great deal of trouble persuading people to bother listening to you). International communication in technical fields like embedded design is done in English. If the O/P wants to be an embedded engineer and to communicate with people from different countries, he needs to learn English. It's not fair, it's not "right" - but it *is* a fact of life.

Even when you bother to read his posts, the project is totally beyond him (based on his posts). Either his "big name" university (does "big name" mean internationally renowned - if so, why not tell us the name?) is failing badly by giving students projects with no appropriate guidance, or the student himself is failing badly by not using the resources available. He has figured out the main components for his design (although why he is specifying an 8051 is beyond me), but apparently hasn't a clue how to turn these into a workable design, and probably hasn't a clue how to program the system. This isn't something that we can help with here - he needs to take appropriate courses and study appropriate books before getting to the point where we can help with the details.

It's not that I don't want to help a student, it's just that giving technical advice like you did is not the help he needs.

I actually did a project like this a while back. This was before I had any real embedded design experience, so I took an EPIA-M mini-ITX motherboard (running Windows 2000), put it into an automotive PC case with a 12V power supply, and stuck it in the trunk of my car.

I plugged a Sierra Wireless GPRS card into one of the PCMCIA slots (that's it with the red antenna sticking out of it), and I plugged a Garmin GPS-18 hockey-puck GPS into one of the USB ports.

The software monitored the switched power lead from the car to automatically bring the PC into and out of hibernation when the car was stopped and started. It read the output of the GPS once/second, and sent the telemetry (position, speed, and GPS constellation info) every 15 seconds via UDP to a Linux server that I had set up.

I placed the unit into the trunk of the car that I allowed my then-teenaged son to drive in order to keep tabs on him. :) It was a fun project, and I enjoyed doing it, but if I were to design such a system again (and I am thinking about doing exactly that) I would do many things differently. For starters, I wouldn't use a full blown PC, I would base it on an embedded micro such as the MC9S12C128 which has a built-in automotive network (CAN) controller. Linking to the car's network is important, as it allows you to monitor the state of the vehicle (such as the current power mode, whether or not the engine is running, whether the alarm has been tripped) and activate the tracking unit accordingly. I'd also want the tracker to "wake up" periodically, acquire a position fix, and report to me immediately via the GPRS link if the vehicle had been moved without my authorization. It would have a backup battery sufficient to operate the tracker even if the thieves disconnect the car's battery and tow the vehicle away. A mercury tilt switch connected to one of the GPIOs would generate a wakeup signal to activate the tracker (and me) immediately if the vehicle is jacked or towed. The tracker and the GPS receiver would be hidden away in the body panels of the vehicle like a Lojack unit, so the thieves won't know it's there and can't disable it.

I have lots more great ideas regarding this stuff - was there anything in particular you were looking for?

If you are just interested in the solution, you could buy a Nokia N95 or an iPhone (the new one with GPS) and write a little program on it for querying the integrated GPS receiver and then sending it. Needs still some work, e.g. researching, if the phones provide access to the GPS, e.g. on N95 maybe you can't access it with the Java implementation, but have to write it for Symbian OS and with the (now) free iPhone SDK, GSM access might be limited, too. For iPhone you could even sell the program with the iPhone store. If you are lucky, there is already such a program and you have to buy this, only :-)

--
Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de

You have that completely wrong.

First, we're not your "friends". We're people your message happened to reach.

Second: no, we don't have a problem with your university. We have a problem with _your_ attitude towards doing _your_ homework. We would have a problem with that university only if (after you reveal what that "big name" actually is) it turns out that this attitude is actively endorsed there.

More importantly you seem to have a major problem understanding what going to a university is about. Hint: it's not about requesting ready-made solutions on the internet.

A similar application would be the APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) used by radio amateurs.

You might find some useful ideas from there.

Paul

I am mostly working for a company with offices all around the world, but with very few people in English speaking countries, so in practice, none of us speaks English (my 3rd language) as the mother tongue. Meaningful phone contacts may become problematic due to very different accents, but even in such cases, an e-mail conversation will usually solve the problem.

Maybe due to this background, understanding some questions in this newsgroup is not so hard, but making sense of any unrealistic assumption is the problem.

I fully agree with this.

Also if working with industrial automation, knowing some German is useful, since some documents are not available in English or are translated by Babelfish :-).

I have also seen this, when someone asks how to do X and the reply is that do A, B and C and then the original poster asks

1.) What is A and how do I implement it 2.) What is B and how do I implement it 3.) What is C and how do I implement it

If this is the likely result of answering what is X, it is no doubt that it is hard to get any responses.

However, in this newsgroup at least, after the initial question asking about what is X, asking about what is B.3.2 would indicate that A and C and most part of B is understood and does not require spoon-feeding.

Paul

I've seen this with the documentation for a Profibus part. The documentation was translated from the German to English by someone who clearly had a poor grasp of either language, and no understanding at all of the part in question, Profibus, or the electronics used. Sometimes phrases in German were copied to the "English" version without an attempt at translation, and much of it retained the German grammar (it read somewhat like Paradise Lost...). For one rather critical chapter, the entire translation was "Original German unclear.". Fortunately, a colleague was able to read the original German.

The IP address he's posting from is in Manchester, England - he could be a student at the University of Manchester. IF he is a university student at all.

Do they have the same "Social Promotion" and "No Child Left Behind" bullshit that we have in the US? Over here we promote failing students because holding them back would be too traumatic to their fragile little egos. And then, once we have socially promoted them all the way through High School, universities are so desperate for tuition money that they accept these barely-literate bozos into their degree programs where they are socially-promoted again, this time to keep the University's dropout rate nice and low.

Anyway, if this is the way they do things over in British schools, it would explain how a barely literate guy managed to make it into a university engineering program.

No doubt it was specified for him by the instructor.

Well, we COULD provide him with a complete, working design. Maybe that's what he means by "help?" :)

He's from Manchester?? I know there are parts of Manchester where keeping yourself alive is more important than getting an education, but I'd have expected much better writing skills from anyone going to higher education (I've been assuming that the OP's written English is bad, because it's not his native tongue).

One thing you have to remember about universities in Britain is that practically every education institute for 18+ ages is called a "university". There used to be "universities", where you studied maths, or engineering, or philosophy, and "polytechnics" where you learned more practical job-related things, such as car mechanics or electronics technician (rather than engineer) skills. Then some half-wit had the idea that they could raise standards, or stop engineers thinking they were "better" than mere technicians, by calling everything "universities". The result is, obviously, that the name "university" is so watered down it is meaningless in the UK.

What we have instead is the concept of "old universities" - universities that were universities before the change, and "new universities", that are practically worthless for academic subjects (even if they are excellent for practical subjects).

The "University of Manchester" is one such "old university", and by all accounts is a good university (apart from its location). The "Manchester Metropolitan University", on the other hand, has a bigger name - and is not a "real" university.

This sounds reasonable, but perhaps some other Brit can answer (I haven't lived in the UK for fifteen years, and my university - Oxford - never had that sort of problem).

His request was *not" fine. Beside his poor English, which I would excuse (but still think that running a spell checker would be a minimum when your English is so bad), what was the sense of mentioning that his project is for a =93big name university=94 and would be good for us to help him? What is the technical relevance of this detail in the context of his question and what would be so good for us if he finishes his project? I found that statement a bit offensive. Second, he had another request on the same subject, using a different account name (lopamundra) which I find inappropriate. What if everybody would create an account for each question he has? Third, the questions he puts here show that he has no basic technical knowledge: he asked how to divide by 0.025 and how to write that number in hex. He could, at least, make the effort to read the corresponding pages in the 8051 manual before asking. Now in this new post, he continues asking general questions, actually his question is just the title of his project, which in translation means: Do you have such a project to give me for free? Well, these are some points, because of which I think his request is not quite =93fine=94