SparkFun Forums

[victorhooi]

heya,

I'm not sure how feasible this idea is, but I was trying to get information on getting a GM852-GPS to fit into the optical bay on a laptop, in order to provide some kind of GPS tracking (e.g., it could SMS it's coords to a pre-programmed number every two days or so, or let you pull it's location on demand).

The next laptop I'm thinking of buying (put it this way, two stolen already) is an Asus R1, but I'm not sure of the spare bay's dimensions. A slot cd-rom drive is roughly 100 x 100mm, with a depth of around 15mm though. So I'd need to fit the module, and any power supply/other stuff in there. Also, I guess I'd need to mount a GPS/GSM antenna on the outside of the laptop, right? (Hopefully can disguise it to look like a wireless antenna....actually, the inbuilt wireless antenna is the wrong frequency, right?)

Power wise, can I somehow draw it safely from the laptop's cells, even when it's powered off? Any advice/pointers on the feasibility of such an undertaking?

Thanks,
Victor

[Krogoth]

If you can, find some detailed specifications of optical drives that fit in the bay - there will probably be more information on these than your specific laptop motherboard. This will give you some idea as to what the power capacity is.

I've found that when a laptop is hibernating rather than switched off, all the USB ports are still powered (useful for charging USB devices). Though unlikely, it may be the same for optical drives (i.e. they might be ejectable when hibernating).

Otherwise, just get a few of those 650mAh Li-Poly batteries, they're plenty small enough to fit.

[maokh]

you could drive it directly off the battery terminals, but you should probably watch for low voltage conditions. You can likely do this all with the GPS-python module. There are also some really small GPS/GSM antennas out there, and you could put it on the inside part.

Power management can bring down the module's power consumption to about 3-4mA while registered to the tower and GPS in standby.