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À partir d’avant-hierInformatique & geek

Waze va afficher de nouvelles alertes attendues de (très) longue date

Waze

L’application GPS est en train de déployer de nouvelles alertes sur sa carte. Waze vous indiquera bientôt la présence de dangers permanents, comme des ralentisseurs et des virages dangereux, directement sur la carte.

Comment le Français Coyote tient tête aux géants Waze et Google Maps

Coyote Concurrent Waze

Autrefois leader incontesté de l’alerte en temps réel, Coyote a dû s’adapter à l’arrivée de concurrents gratuits comme Waze. S’il n’est plus numéro 1 de l’avertissement, il réussit à tenir tête à ces géants grâce, notamment, à une excellente stratégie de diversification.

La Russie est suspectée d’avoir largement brouillé les GPS en Pologne

Des perturbations GPS sont observées aux abords de Kaliningrad. La Russie est suspectée de tester un système de brouillage d'ondes d'un nouveau genre, appelé Tobol. La Pologne est particulièrement affectée par ce brouilleur.

Cette astuce qui permet (enfin !) à Google Maps de fonctionner sous les tunnels

Google maps

Avec cette nouvelle fonctionnalité, Google Maps va pouvoir continuer de fonctionner... dans les tunnels !

Dépassé par Maps, Waze et autres Plans, TomTom stoppe la vente de ses GPS

Tomtom Assistant Vocal

Face à une concurrence toujours plus féroce, à savoir Google Maps, Plans ou encore Waze, TomTom raccroche définitivement les GPS.

Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find

Dragon Sector uploaded a video to social media after discovering an "undocumented ‘unlock code’ which you could enter from the train driver’s panel" fixed "mysterious issues" impacting trains in Poland.

Enlarge / Dragon Sector uploaded a video to social media after discovering an "undocumented ‘unlock code’ which you could enter from the train driver’s panel" fixed "mysterious issues" impacting trains in Poland. (credit: Adam Haertle on YouTube)

An unusual right-to-repair drama is disrupting railroad travel in Poland despite efforts by hackers who helped repair trains that allegedly were designed to stop functioning when serviced by anyone but Newag, the train manufacturer.

Members of an ethical hacking group called Dragon Sector, including Sergiusz Bazański and Michał Kowalczyk, were called upon by a train repair shop, Serwis Pojazdów Szynowych (SPS), to analyze train software in June 2022. SPS was desperate to figure out what was causing "mysterious failures" that shut down several vehicles owned by Polish train operator the Lower Silesian Railway, Polish infrastructure trade publication Rynek Kolejowy reported. At that point, the shortage of trains had already become "a serious problem" for carriers and passengers, as fewer available cars meant shorter trains and reduced rider capacity, Rynek Kolejowy reported.

Dragon Sector spent two months analyzing the software, finding that "the manufacturer's interference" led to "forced failures and to the fact that the trains did not start," and concluding that bricking the trains "was a deliberate action on Newag's part."

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Comment bien choisir son GPS vélo

Par : Morgane S.

Bye bye le compteur classique, le GPS vélo est devenu en quelques années l’accessoire indispensable pour ne plus se perdre et s'entraîner. Car au-delà de ses qualités de guide, il s’est aussi transformé en véritable coach grâce à l’ajout de nombreuses fonctionnalités et l’évolution des technologies embarquées dans son cockpit.   [Lire la suite]

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Pourquoi Waze reçoit soudainement une vague de mauvais commentaires

Waze Mauvais Avis

Les utilisateurs de Waze sont de plus en plus déçus par l’application…

Est-il interdit d’utiliser son GPS de smartphone au volant ?

Par : RPB

smartphone voiture gps

La réponse à cette question est moins simple que vous ne le pensez : dans certains cas, vous risquez une amende, alors que si vous respectez certaines règles, vous serez épargné.

ZombieTrackerGPS – Enfin une alternative gratuite à BaseCamp sous Linux

Par : Korben

Vous êtes un passionné d’activités de plein air et vous cherchez une alternative gratuite à Garmin BaseCamp pour gérer vos itinéraires GPS ?

ZombieTrackerGPS est là pour vous ! Que vous soyez randonneur, cycliste, coureur ou simplement amateur de balades en nature, cette application de gestion de suivi GPS est faite pour vous.

L’une des meilleures choses à propos de ZombieTrackerGPS, c’est qu’il est compatible avec les systèmes Linux. Vous pouvez donc profiter de ses fonctionnalités avancées et de sa protection de la vie privée sans avoir à changer de système d’exploitation. De plus, il prend en charge plusieurs formats de fichiers, ce qui vous permet de travailler avec différents types de cartes et de données.

Pour installer ZombieTrackerGPS, vous aurez besoin de l’environnement de bureau KDE sur Ubuntu et ses dérivés. Voici comment procéder :

Ouvrez le terminal et entrez la commande suivante pour installer l’environnement de bureau KDE :

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Ensuite, téléchargez le package et installez le :

wget https://www.zombietrackergps.net/repo/zombietrackergps.deb

sudo dpkg -i zombietrackergps.deb

sudo apt-get install -f

Maintenant, vous pouvez lancer ZombieTrackerGPS en passant par le menu des applications de votre Linux.

Malheureusement, en raison de restrictions liées aux conditions d’utilisation, l’application ne peut pas légalement prendre en charge Google Maps. Cependant, ne vous inquiétez pas, car il existe de nombreuses autres options de cartes disponibles pour vous aider à planifier et à suivre vos aventures en plein air.

Parmi les fonctionnalités avancées de ZombieTrackerGPS, on trouve la possibilité de créer et d’éditer des itinéraires, de gérer des waypoints et de visualiser des statistiques détaillées sur vos activités. De plus, vous pouvez importer et exporter des données dans différents formats, ce qui facilite la collaboration avec d’autres applications et services.

En ce qui concerne la protection de la vie privée, ZombieTrackerGPS est conçu pour ne pas partager vos données avec des tiers. Vous pouvez donc être sûr que vos informations de localisation restent confidentielles et ne sont pas utilisées à des fins publicitaires ou autres.

En résumé, ZombieTrackerGPS est une excellente alternative gratuite à Garmin BaseCamp pour les amateurs d’activités de plein air qui utilisent Linux. Avec ses fonctionnalités avancées, sa compatibilité avec plusieurs formats de fichiers et sa protection de la vie privée, il est certainement un outil à tester pour tous ceux qui aiment explorer le monde qui les entoure.

À découvrir ici.

Des vautours visent les coyotes 2.0

Le professionnel des solutions de navigation GPS, Coyote, alerte ses utilisateurs de la mise en place de faux sites, par des hackers malveillants, pour intercepter leurs données personnelles....

Raspberry Pi Pico balloon tracker

Dave Akerman of High Altitude Ballooning came up with a stratospherically cool application for Raspberry Pi Pico. In this guest blog, he shows you how to build and code a weather balloon tracker.

Balloon tracking

My main hobby is flying weather balloons, using GPS/radio trackers to relay their position to the ground, so they can be tracked and hopefully recovered. Trackers minimally consist of a GPS receiver feeding the current position to a small computer, which in turn controls a radio transmitter to send that position to the ground. That position is then fed to a live map to aid chasing and recovering the flight.

system-1024x813-500x396
How it all works

This essential role of the tracker computer is thus a simple one, and those making their own trackers can choose from a variety of microcontrollers chips and boards, for example Arduino boards, PIC microcontrollers or the BBC Microbit. Anything with a modest amount of code memory, data memory, processor power and I/O (serial, SPI etc depending on choice of GPS and radio) will do. A popular choice is Raspberry Pi, which, whilst a sledgehammer to crack a nut for tracking, does make it easy to add a camera.

Raspberry Pi Pico

When I see a new type of processor board, I feel duty bound to make it into a balloon tracker, so when I was asked to help test the new Raspberry Pi Pico, doing so was my first thought. It has plenty of I/O – SPI ports, I2C and serial all available – plus a unique ability (not that I need it for now) to add extra peripherals using the programmable PIO modules, so there was no doubt that it would be very usable. Also, having much more memory than typical microcontrollers, it offers the ability to add functions that would normally need a full Raspberry Pi board – for example on-board landing prediction. More on that later.

Tracker components

So a basic tracker has a GPS receiver and radio transmitter. To connect these to the Raspberry Pi Pico, I used a prototyping board where I mounted a UBlox GPS receiver, LoRa radio transmitter, and sockets for the Pico itself.

I don’t use breadboards as they are prone to intermittent connections that then waste programming time chasing a “bug” that’s actually a hardware problem. Besides, trackers need to be robust so I would need to solder one together eventually anyway.

Pico top, GPS bottom-left; LoRa bottom-right

The particular UBlox GPS module I had handy only has a serial port brought out, so I couldn’t use I2C. No matter because, unlike most Arduino boards, the Raspberry Pi Pico isn’t limited to a single serial port.

The LoRa module connects via SPI and a single GPIO pin which the module uses to send its status (e.g. packet sent – ready to send next packet) to the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Finally, with the tracker working, I added an I2C environmental sensor to the board via a pin header, so the sensor can be placed in free air outside the tracker.

Development setup

I decided to use C for my tracker rather than Python, for a variety of reasons. The main one is that I have plenty of existing C tracker code to work from, for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, but not so much Python. Secondly, I figured that most of the testers would be using Python so there might be more of a need to test the C toolchain.

The easiest route to getting the C/C++ toolchain working is to install on a Raspberry Pi 4. I couldn’t quite get the VSCode integration working (finger trouble I think) but anyway I’m quite happy to code with an editor and separate build window. So what I ended up with was Notepadd++ on my Windows PC to edit the code, with the source on a Raspberry Pi 4. I then had an ssh window open to run the compile/link steps, and a separate one running the debugger. The debugger downloads the binary to the Raspberry Pi Pico via the latter’s debug port.

For regular debug output from the program I connected a Raspberry Pi Pico serial port to an FTDI USB Serial TTL adapter connected back to my PC – see the image below.

At some point I’ll revisit this setup. First, it’s now possible to printf to a virtual USB serial port, so that frees up that Raspberry Pi Pico serial port. Secondly, I need to get that VSCode integration working.

Tracker code

My Raspberry Pi and Arduino tracker programs work slightly differently. On the Raspberry Pi, to separate the code for the different functions (GPS, radio, sensors etc) I use a separate thread for each. That allows for example a new packet to be sent to the radio transmitter without delay, even if a slow operation is running concurrently elsewhere.

On the Arduino, with no threads available, the code is still split into separate modules but each one is coded to run quickly without waiting in a loop for a peripheral to respond. For example some temperature sensors can take a second or so to take a measurement, and it’s vital not to sit in a loop waiting for the result.

The C toolchain for Raspberry Pi Pico doesn’t, by default, support threaded code unfortunately. Rather than rebuild it with support added, I opted for the approach I use with Arduino. So the main code starts with initialising each module individually, and then sits in a tight loop calling each module once per loop. It’s then up to each module to return control swiftly so that the loop keeps running quickly and no module is kept waiting for long.

Code modules

The GPS code uses a serial port to receive NMEA data from the GPS. NMEA is the standard ASCII protocol used by pretty much every GPS module that exists, and includes the current date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude and other data. All we need to do is confirm that the data is valid, then read and store these key values. The other important function is to ensure that the GPS module is in the correct “flight mode” so that it works at high altitude – without this then it will stop providing new positions about 18km altitude.

View NMEA Data Log

The LoRa radio code checks to see when the module is not transmitting, then builds a new telemetry message containing the above GPS data plus the name of the balloon, any other sensor data, and the landing prediction (see later).

This message is passed to the LoRa chip via SPI, then the chip switches on its radio and modulates the radio signal with the telemetry data. Once the message has been sent then the chip switches on its DIO0 output which is connected to the Raspberry Pi Pico so it knows when it can send another message.

All messages are received on the ground (in this case by a Pi LoRa receiver) and then uploaded to an internet database that in turn drives a live Google map (see image below).

Sensors

Usefully for balloon trackers, the Raspberry Pi Pico can be powered directly from battery via an on-board buck-boost converter.

The input voltage connects through a potential divider to an analog sense input (ADC3) to allow for easy measurement of the battery voltage. Note that the ADC reference voltage is the 3.3V rail, which is noisy especially when used to power external devices such as the GPS and LoRa both of which have rather spiky power consumption requirements, so the code averages out many measurements.

An alternative would be to add a precise reference voltage to the ADC but I went for the zero cost software option.

The board temperature can also be measured, this time using ADC4. That’s less useful though for a tracker than an external temperature measurement, so I added a BME280 device for that. The Raspberry Pi Pico samples include code for the BME connected via SPI, but I chose I2C so I needed to replace the SPI calls with I2C calls. Pretty easy. The BME280 returns pressure – probably the most interesting environmental measurement for a balloon tracker – and humidity too.

Landing prediction

So far, everything I’ve done could also be done on a basic AVR chip e.g. the Arduino Mini Pro, with some spare room. However, one very useful extra is to add a prediction of the landing point.

We use online flight prediction prior to launch, to determine roughly where the balloon will land (within a few miles) so we know it’s safe to launch without landing near a city for example. This uses a global wind prediction database plus some flight parameters (e.g. ascent rate and burst altitude) to predict the path of the balloon from launch to landing. It can be very accurate if those parameters are followed through on the flight itself.

Of course the actual flight never quite follows the plan – for example the launch might be later than planned, and in changing wind conditions that itself can move the landing point by miles. So it’s useful to have a live prediction during that flight, and indeed we have that, using the same wind database.

However, since it’s online, and 3G/4G can be patchy when chasing a balloon, it’s useful to have an independent landing prediction. This can be done in the tracker itself, by storing the wind speed and direction (deduced from GPS positions) on the way up, measuring the descent rate after burst, applying that to an atmospheric density model to plot the future descent rate to the ground, and then calculating the effect of the wind during descent and finally producing a landing position.

Typical Arduino boards don’t have enough memory to store the measured wind data, but the Raspberry Pi Pico has more than enough. I ported my existing code which:

  1. During ascent, it splits the vertical range into 100 metres sections, into which it stores the latitude and longitude deltas as degrees per second.
  2. Every few seconds, it runs a prediction of the landing position based on the current position, the data in that array, and an estimated descent profile that uses a simple atmospheric model plus default values for payload weight and parachute effectiveness.
  3. During descent, the parachute effectiveness is measured, and the actual figure is used in the above calculation in (2).
  4. Calculates the time it will spend within each 100m section of air, then multiplies that by the stored wind speed to calculate the horizontal distance and direction it is expected to travel in that section.
  5. Adds all those sectional movements together, adds those to the current position, and produces the landing prediction.
  6. Sends that position down to the ground with the rest of the telemetry.

Phew. Now we know pretty much everything about how balloon trackers work. Thanks Dave! Also, if you want to go on your own near-space flight, check out High Altitude Ballooning.

The post Raspberry Pi Pico balloon tracker appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Feelloo by Ubiscale, Stylish and Tiniest Cat Medallion with GPS

Every year at CES, we see a galore of pet technology, including tons of trackers. What sets Felloo apart from the typical GPS-enabled collar is its tiny size and its stylish design. Most well-rated cat and dog GPS trackers are bulkier and ugly, so it had to take a French Tech startup to make cats fashionable while ensuring their safety.According to the company, one cat gets lost every 12 minutes […]

Build a Raspberry Pi chartplotter for your boat

Par : Alex Bate

Earlier this year, James Conger built a chartplotter for his boat using a Raspberry Pi. Here he is with a detailed explanation of how everything works:

Building your own Chartplotter with a Raspberry Pi and OpenCPN

Provides an overview of the hardware and software needed to put together a home-made Chartplotter with its own GPS and AIS receiver. Cost for this project was about $350 US in 2019.

The entire build cost approximately $350. It incorporates a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, dAISy AIS receiver HAT, USB GPS module, and touchscreen display, all hooked up to his boat.

Perfect for navigating the often foggy San Francisco Bay, the chartplotter allows James to track the position, speed, and direction of major vessels in the area, superimposed over high-quality NOAA nautical charts.

Raspberry Pi at sea

For more nautically themed Raspberry Pi projects, check out Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega’s stunning Barometer and Ufuk Arslan’s battery-saving IoT boat hack.

The post Build a Raspberry Pi chartplotter for your boat appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Tracking the Brecon Beacons ultramarathon with a Raspberry Pi Zero

Par : Helen Lynn

On my holidays this year I enjoyed a walk in the Brecon Beacons. We set out nice and early, walked 22km through some of the best scenery in Britain, got a cup of tea from the snack van on the A470, and caught our bus home. “I enjoyed that walk,” I thought, “and I’d like to do one like it again.” What I DIDN’T think was, “I’d like to do that walk again, only I’d like it to be nearly three times as long, and it definitely ought to have about three times more ascent, or else why bother?”

Alan Peaty is a bit more hardcore than me, so, a couple of weekends ago, he set out on the Brecon Beacons 10 Peaks Ultramarathon: “10 peaks; 58 kilometres; 3000m of ascent; 24 hours”. He went with his friend Neil and a Raspberry Pi Zero in an eyecatching 3D-printed case.

A green 3D-printed case with a Raspberry Pi sticker on it, on a black backpack leaning against a cairn. In the background are a sunny mountain top, distant peaks, and a blue sky with white clouds.

“The brick”, nestling on a backpack, with sunlit Corn Du and Pen y Fan in the background

The Raspberry Pi Zero ensemble – lovingly known as the brick or, to give it its longer name, the Rosie IoT Brick or RIoT Brick – is equipped with a u-blox Neo-6 GPS module, and it also receives GPS tracking info from some smaller trackers built using ESP32 microcontrollers. The whole lot is powered by a “rather weighty” 20,000mAh battery pack. Both the Raspberry Pi and the ESP32s were equipped with “all manner of additional sensors” to track location, temperature, humidity, pressure, altitude, and light level readings along the route.

Charts showing temperature, humidity & pressure, altitude, and light levels along the route, together with a route map

Where the route crosses over itself is the most fervently appreciated snack van in Wales

Via LoRa and occasional 3G/4G from the many, many peaks along the route, all this data ends up on Amazon Web Services. AWS, among other things, hosts an informative website where family members were able to keep track of Alan’s progress along windswept ridges and up 1:2 gradients, presumably the better to appreciate their cups of tea and central heating. Here’s a big diagram of how the kit that completed the ultramarathon fits together; it’s full of arrows, dotted lines, and acronyms.

Alan, Neil, the brick, and the rest of their gear completed the event in an impressive 18 hours and one minute, for which they got a medal.

The brick, a small plastic box full of coloured jumper leads and other electronics; the lid of the box; and a medal consisting of the number 10 in large plastic characters on a green ribbon

Well earned

You can follow the adventures of this project, its antecedents, and the further evolutions that are doubtless to come, on the Rosie the Red Robot Twitter feed. And you can find everything to do with the project in this GitHub repository, so you can complete ultramarathons while weighed down with hefty power bricks and bristling with homemade tracking devices, too, if you like. Alan is raising money for Alzheimer’s Research UK with this event, and you can find his Brecon Beacons 10 Peaks JustGiving page here.

The post Tracking the Brecon Beacons ultramarathon with a Raspberry Pi Zero appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

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