Everyone likes a good nap
You know when you find your pet napping and it’s just SO CUTE - but then you have that fleeting “oh man, are they still breathing" scare?
We do too! Except it’s for GPS trackers on motorbikes and caravans.
Say what, now?
No no, stay with me here..
It’s a good analogy - I swear!
It’s no secret to anyone that the core software platform we use here at ImmoTrack Online is a “fork” of the popular open source Traccar project. Well, at least it was - we’ve made a large number of alterations. To quote another favourite line from my childhood:
Don’t judge me like that, Obi Wan.
We’ve made huge changes and improvements to the Traccar platform. We even posted a while ago about how we are always online. However, some customer vehicles can’t stay online all the time; even with the excellent low power consumption of Teltonika GPS trackers that we use, some vehicle batteries are small, or not regularly charged.
You know: Motorbikes. And Caravans.
Sometimes you need a nap
Vehicles with small batteries or batteries that don’t charge regularly do need our GPS trackers to go into an even deeper sleep mode. This means they’re not online but they’re also not malfunctioning; they’re just asleep, having a nap until it’s next time to check in (or if they urgently wake up due to some bugger trying to steal the vehicle they’re attached to).
Enter the Traccar online/offline/unknown statuses..
Traccar, without any modifications, marks devices as in one of three states: Online, Offline, or Unknown.
Online: works! It lets you know your tracker is awake and ready for action
Unknown: works! It lets you know your tracker is probably having a bad time right now and might be out of mobile network range.
Offline: ehhhhhh. Yes, it does mean that your GPS tracker disconnected from the server. But why? Did it go to sleep? Was it kicked in the nuts by Telstra and told to disconnect? Enquring minds want to know!
Basically the offline status had two major problems for our customers:
The customer doesn’t know why the tracker is offline
The status colour is Red, and red usually means bad
Now for the big reveal!
We’ve now rolled out a major update to the vehicle statuses with an additional and new status of - wait for it, you’ll never guess! - Sleeping!
OK you absolutely guessed.
How does this work, you may ask?
No, it’s not actually magic. It’s just our deep understanding of the Internet, and network protocols.
So now, when your GPS tracker enters a clean sleep state, the status will change to “Sleeping” and stay green.
Look at that green!
It’s reassuring to see this. Not just for customers, but also when we are performing any form of troubleshooting, it immediately lets us know what state a GPS tracker module is in.
The sleeping status is live, as of today and for all customers. And now, when a device status colour turns red, you know it means that it’s probably the mobile network operator telling your GPS tracker to disconnect due to cell tower congestion. Thankfully, that’s rare.
Will you see the status?
If your GPS tracker is fitted to a car, or truck, you likely won’t see this status because in your case, your tracker is permanently maintaining an online connection to ImmoTrack servers. But for those of you with a tracker fitted to a motorbike, caravan, or trailer, you can now…
Sleep Soundly.
Hah! Sometimes I amaze even myself.
