Making my vehicle smarter: Anti-theft GPS tracker system for Gixxer SF

I am back here with a problem that kept me excited for a long while: Setting up a GPS tracker system for my bike. I love motorcycles and I drive a Suzuki Gixxer SF. Surprisingly even in this era of IOT, vehicle and accessory manufacturers haven’t been exactly innovating strongly on these features. With the introduction of Ather smart scooters, I am hoping more and more vehicle manufacturers start adopting some of these technology integrations and making our vehicles smarter.

Finding the correct GPS tracker

My requirement is to get a GPS tracker setup which also functions as an anti-theft device. At the same time, I also want to be in control of my data. Most devices on the market work with proprietary mechanisms, and a lot of them even go a step beyond with a locked data provider with monthly subscriptions. The problem with vendor lock-in is that the tracker becomes useless if the company decides so / shuts down.

There are some trackers that operate using just the SMS protocol, however in last couple of years, data has become very cheap in India, so no reason to even settle for such a tracking device which just supports SMS. Tracking over mobile internet allows to track at much smaller intervals, and at the same time can communicate to a server rather than just sending SMSes to an other number.

Thus I started looking for GPS trackers that allow me to:
a) be able to use any provider of my choice,
b) have 3G support for better tracking
c) works on an open protocol and not a proprietary one.

Why not build my own tracker hardware?

Building my own cheap GPS tracker device isn’t hard at all, it just involves getting a microcontroller and integrating it with a GPS and a GSM module.

The challenge in building my own hardware is to make it rugged enough to fit in my bike and work well through the vibrations, environmental wear and tear. It should also be small enough so that it does not cause a safety hazard while driving.

A note about privacy

Since we don’t control the hardware, it is impossible to be able to completely disable the tracker manufacturer from having access to your data or creating backdoors, but that’s a tradeoff I made against building my own hardware.

Getting and setting up the tracker Hardware

My search ended with the SinoTrack ST-901 GPS tracker, which is fairly cheap and does everything I am looking for. I purchased the 3G version of the GPS tracker from the above link. It is also officially supported by Traccar since it uses the h02 protocol.

SinoTrack ST-901 adds a few essential features beyond what I was looking for:

Shock alarm: Ability to wake up the tracker when the vehicle is moving

Battery backup: I am not completely sure how useful this is, since it is finally going to get charged off my vehicle’s battery.

Ignition detection: The tracker comes with an additional wire that you can hook up to the ignition or accessory circuit on your vehicle. The advantage of this is to configure different periods of sleeping and tracking when the bike is on and off in order to avoid draining battery when the bike is stationary for a long time.

Probably the only missing thing in this sensor is a relay control to control your ignition remotely. That being said, I don’t think it is a deal breaker for me at the moment.

Installing the GPS tracker hardware

On Suzuki Gixxer SF, the battery is present below the left side fairing. You can open the left side fairing by opening up these 3 screws and one screw under the seat.

I setup the GPS tracker on top of the battery attached using Foam tape and Tie-wraps. It holds pretty well even with potholed Indian roads or driving with high speed.

WARNING: Before you proceed to electronics and wiring, be cautious. Our hearts are extremely sensitive and a very small current can stop them. Use caution while working with battery terminals and multimeters, never touch both terminals together. Yes even a multimeter can be fatal.

The tracker comes with 3 wires:

Battery wires Red and Black directly go on the positive and negative terminals of the battery. If you just do this, you have the tracker to work without Ignition detection.

The third wire or the Accessory wire, is the wire that needs to connected to the ignition circuit, and activated only when the ignition is on. See the section below on ACC circuit.

Accessory circuit / ACC circuit

This is the hardest part of installing the tracker. Different manufacturers have different kind of circuits for being able to install accessories. The GixxerSF does not have any accessible way of doing that, and none explained in the manual. My solution around this is to directly use the Ignition circuit. The ignition circuit works simply as a switch that turns on all the vehicle’s electronics when the key turns it on.

We need to connect our ACC wire to the ignition circuit such that it turns on when the circuit is closed. The thing to take care of here is to ensure that the ACC wire is connected to the part of the switch with 0 voltage. Otherwise, the tracker would see it as ACC always on, which is opposite of what we require.

How do you figure out where to connect the ACC wire?
Step 1: Find the connector for the Ignition circuit and disconnect it.
Step 2: On the key side of the circuit, you can confirm that the ignition key acts as a switch using the multimeter connectivity mode. WARNING: Never use the connectivity mode with a circuit connected to the battery. It can damage your circuit.
Step 3: On the other side of the circuit, use the Voltage mode in the multimeter to identify which the higher voltage terminal is. We will connect the ACC wire to the terminal with lower voltage.

Here’s my ACC wire connected to the lower voltage pin on the connector directly. I didn’t need to take the right side fairing off(and that’s a lot of work), there’s a fair bit of space to get this done anyway. Note If you are smart enough, I also taught you to Hotwire my bike 😉

WARNING: I connected to the GPS tracker directly to the battery and the Ignition circuit, doesn’t mean you should too. Here we bypassed all the protection mechanisms in place to protect short circuits like fuses and if this device ever malfunctions, it is likely to damage things on your bike. Do this at your own risk.

ST-901 GPS tracker in action

The setup of the SinoTrack ST-901 GPS tracker is very easy. Insert a SIM card into the device and set the APN. For my provider (Airtel) the APN is airtelgprs.com.

By default, the manual contains information of a SinoTrack server and mobile app which can be used to track the device.

I would not be doing justice if I didn’t mention how useful this GPS tracker is even without setting up any custom software. In terms of usability, I think the device out of the box might just fine in terms of what most people would require(if you don’t value your privacy 🙂 ). My settings are as follows:

Ignition SMS: On turn on and off immediately

Shock SMS: Immediate

Tracking with Ignition On: 30s

Tracking with Ignition Off: 18000s

Here is the tracker in action, I get an SMS immediately after the ignition key is on.

Software – Traccar server

Here I try to solve the second part of the problem, i.e. being in control of my data and setting up my own GPS tracking server. I use an Open source software Traccar for doing that. Traccar officially supports a lot of devices, so this section might be applicable to folks with other devices too.

If you have a static IP given by your internet provider, just setup Traccar on your home computer. Unfortunately I don’t have one, so I just used an AWS server for running Traccar. I run a t2.micro machine with Ubuntu for running Traccar, but it seems fairly lightweight, so there is some definite scope for cost optimization there.

How to setup?

Traccar documentation has a fairly good set of documentation on how to get started. In case your device isn’t supported officially, do check this guide out since you might find that it still uses one of the protocols.

For the SinoTrack ST-901 tracker, the setup works out of the box based on the devices documentation.

Simply point your tracker device to send data to YOUR-IP:5013 by using the SMS command: 804PASSWORD YOUR-IP 5013.

Open the Traccar UI and login. Once you do, add a new device and enter the ID that’s printed on your device.

In case you can’t find the ID, simply go to /opt/traccar/logs/tracker-server.log on your host and that should be printing the ID as unknown device.

Note : You might need to open inbound traffic on your 5013 port using AWS security groups.

Features

Traccar has a lot of features, but here are some of them that I explored and liked.

Building reports showing routes taken

Building complex geofences

Traccar notifications: Custom notifications based on Geofences, activity etc.

Mobile app

An API to build your own apps on top of Traccar system.I think IFTTT integration might be something I would try to build!

That’s all for this post. This was a fun thing for me hacking around my motorcycle and making it smarter 🙂 Reach out if you have any other ideas to try out.