GPS and Dash-Cam on Website?

Hi all,

I am helping a friend, who is an owner of a small trucking company (small as in 1 truck), with his web site. This is probably a little ambitious, but there is a couple ideas we would like to investigate.

First, we would like to have a map embedded on his site that shows his current position in real time. We are hoping that he could maybe buy a GPS unit from a manufacturer that would have this capability and maybe even a plug-in for his site? Rand Macnally has a unit that from what I've read MAY have this ability, but my emails to their customer service department have so far gone unanswered.

Secondly, does anybody think having a camera mounted on his dash, facing the road like the police have, could be streamed over the web? He is willing to go as far as attaching it to a laptop if need be and buying a Verizon Hotspot for the bandwidth.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The GPS tracking is not a trivial thing to do since you want something that will take the GPS coordinates and transmit to a server to keep and then your website will take that information and place it on a map and so on.

There are many services (a quick Google search for "live tracking trucks") yielded a bunch of services that do this and provide a web interface. You could basically embed their web interface within your website within an IFRAME or separate window as opposed to creating your own system.

Some of the services also had video capability, so you might want to explore that..

Sometimes it's cleaner and more cost effective to use a service that already exists as opposed to hacking something together that doesn't fully realize what you are trying to accomplish..