Live Location Sharing
+ HappyPartner - HappyLife
Overview
With GPSLogger it’s possible to frequently share your live location with others. Who is going to be able to access your location is totally up to you. The app does not offer an additional backend-service which is sharing your current location - all is happening from your device only. The sharing happens either by simply emailing or the app can frequently send your location to a custom URL in a given format (including support for Home Assistant). Once the location has been sent to such a URL it is beyond the control of the app - use this feature wisely.
The HappyPartner - HappyLife is an extension of the regular share-current-location functionality that was built into GPSLogger almost from the first day. Initially called HappyWife - HappyLife, the function has been renamed in 2022. The intention of this function is to let a recipient (or multiple recipients) know your current location after a certain amount of time.
When I am on a solo cycling tour, then my wife knows, I usually return after 2 hours. When I am not back at home after a certain time Gaby is going to start to get a bit nervous. Of course, she can give me a call or check otherwise where the heck I am, or she’s simply going to receive frequent emails from GPSLogger when I am not back home after 2 hours, letting her know my current location (so she can judge, if I will return shortly - or if it’s going to take another 4 hours).
Requirement
- App needs to be able to send eMails (be online)
or - The app must be able to complete a URL request in some other way
Sharing your location
In order to be able to share you location you need to start the recording process - the sharing will continue when you are pausing the recording.
You have the option to share your location in three different ways:
- Sharing by email
- Sharing via an own backend / generate custom URL requests
- Sharing by executing a TASKER-TASK
- Sharing via your Home Assistant instance - see Home Assistant section
All these options can be combined with each other.
Start sharing your location after a delay
As described above you might not want to instantly share your location once you start with your activity - therefore you can specify in the application settings an initial delay. Only if your activity takes longer then this initial delay will the sharing process be started.
You can specify such a delay via: Application Settings > Sharing Location Information > HappyPartner HappyLife
Share via eMail
Specify a recipient (or multiple recipients), specify a subject that should be used and additionally specify the content of the email that will be sent by the application. Additionally, to your custom body the app will add other data (used location values are just an example):
Current Location: https://maps.google.com/?q=HERE_2022-01-21T12:19:56.167Z@47.39553088,11.22492661&z=12
Lat: 47.39553088
Lon: 11.22492661
Course: 234°
Speed: 3.2 km/h
Sent via GPSLogger II - https://www.emacberry.com/gpslogger.html
Share your location via TASKER
Please see the dedicated TASKER Integration section of this manual.
Share your location via a custom URL
You can specify a custom URL to which GPSLogger is going to send a simple GET-Request including your current position as decimal latitude & longitude values, as URL parameters, all as plain text, not encoded & not encrypted. A timeout of 5 seconds for the request will be used.
Additional to the defined time interval in which the app is going to send the current location of the device to your
specified URL, the app will send on Start/Stop recording and Pause/Continue recording events additional requests
that contains an additional parameter cmd (with the event type as value) in order to allow you further server side
actions.
You might like to add some sort of ID to your URL, if you want to be able to distinguish between multiple GPSLogger installations on your backend.
It’s strongly recommend that you use HTTPS in your custom URL to protect your data
The GET-REQUEST will have the following format:
{YOUR_SERVER_URL}?lat={LATITUDE_AS_DECIMAL_NUMBER}&lon={LONGITUDE_AS_DECIMAL_NUMBER}[&cmd={start|stop|pause|continue}]
As an example, if you have your own server/domain, and you want to collect your locations there, then you can write some small request processing code yourself and deploy it on your server. Assuming your domain is called www.anyfancydoma.in, and you have written a PHP script called incoming that’s going to process the requests, then you should specify in the application settings the URL https://www.anyfancydoma.in/incoming.php.
If your server URL contains an additional custom device-likeID parameter and therefore already including a ?, the app
will add an & instead of the ? after the given [YOUR_SERVER_URL].
The resulting requests the app generates will then look like this (just as an example - of course lat, lon and id values will be different):
https://www.anyfancydoma.in/incoming.php?lat=47.39553088&lon=11.22492661
Please note that there is no backend available @ emacberry.com that would handle live location requests - simply because of privacy concerns that would come with hosting this kind of data.
Here is some example PHP code that is able to process GPSLogger live location sharing requests and store this data into a local mysql database table with the name gpslogger_live (the config.php has to contain your database credentials):
<?php
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time() + 60) . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
header("Content-Type: image/png");
if(!empty($_REQUEST["lat"]) && !empty($_REQUEST["lon"])){
require('./config.php');
if (defined('ALL_DBOK')){
$con = mysqli_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpasswd);
if (!$con){
//die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
} else{
mysqli_select_db($con, $dbname);
// logging the incomming live location...
$cmd = $_REQUEST["cmd"];
if($cmd){
// do something special with 'start/stop/pause/continue'
}
$lon = $_REQUEST["lon"];
$lat = $_REQUEST["lat"];
// only required when you do in-range queries later..
$sin_lat_rad = sin($lat * 180 / M_PI );
$sin_lng_rad = sin($lng * 180 / M_PI );
$cos_lat_rad = cos($lat * 180 / M_PI );
$cos_lng_rad = cos($lng * 180 / M_PI );
$insert = sprintf("INSERT INTO your_location_live_data (
lat, lng,
sin_lat_rad, sin_lng_rad, cos_lat_rad, cos_lng_rad)
VALUES ('%s', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s', '%s');",
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $lat),
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $lng),
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $sin_lat_rad),
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $sin_lng_rad),
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $cos_lat_rad),
mysqli_real_escape_string($con, $cos_lng_rad)
);
mysqli_query($con, $insert);
mysqli_close($con);
}
}
}else{
http_response_code(404);
}
?>
A config.php template - ??? have to be replaced with your mysql db values
<?php
$dbhost = '???';
$dbport = '???';
$dbname = '???';
$dbuser = '???';
$dbpasswd = '???';
@define('ALL_DBOK', true);
?>
Creating the MySQL db with the possibility to create in-range queries
CREATE TABLE `your_location_live_data` (
`lat` double NOT NULL,
`lng` double NOT NULL,
`sin_lat_rad` decimal(10,10) DEFAULT NULL,
`sin_lng_rad` decimal(10,10) DEFAULT NULL,
`cos_lat_rad` decimal(10,10) DEFAULT NULL,
`cos_lng_rad` decimal(10,10) DEFAULT NULL,
`ts` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
PRIMARY KEY (`lat`, `ts`),
KEY `sin_lat_rad` (`sin_lat_rad`,`sin_lng_rad`,`cos_lat_rad`,`cos_lng_rad`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;
COMMIT;