VRM GPS Tracking Application

What is it?

This is a simple mapping application that downloads the GPS tracks from a VRM portal for an installation and displays them on a map alonf with the current location.

Why Do I Care?

If you have a Victron GX monitoring device with a GPS attached in your RV, boat or other vehicle, and want to share your location with friends or family, then this application does it.

How does it Work?

There is a index.php script that handles connecting to the VRM portal and downloading the current GPS information along with the track for some number of days in the past.

Each installation that is connected to VRM allows monitoring and control of that configuration via the VRM portal. Since you probably don't want people controlling your installation the script handles that and then emits an HTML page with just the GPS current info and the request GPS track. Obviously you need to make sure you have proper protection on whatever system you host this on.

Here is the VRM API Documentation

https://docs.victronenergy.com/vrmapi/overview.html

How do I Install It?

This repository cantains an NPM project that uses OpenLayers web mapping package displaying OpenStreetMap (OSM) map tiles. If you want to modify the project you can install NPM and go for that, but if you just want to use the existing project as is, then all you need to do is edit index.php and copy the following file to a directory on your webserver.

// ****************** edit these for your configuration ****************
// vrm info
$installationID = '*****';
$user = '******';
$userID = '******';
$pass = '******';
$ptoken = '******';

// set some defaults for the map in case we fail to reach vrm portal
// I picked my home lat, lon
$title = 'My Tracking Map Page';
$lat = '42.902734';
$lon = '-71.258601';
$speed = 'unknown';
$altitude = 'unknown';

// default days in the past you want you track to show
$days = 3;

// ****** don't edit below this line unless you know what your doing ****

Then copy the following files to a directory in your webserver. For example, if you web ROOT is like /html/ and you create a directory /trackmyrv/, then copy each of the files below into /html/trackmyrv/ and you should be able to access the from a browser at: http://example.com/trackmyrv/index.php. Make sure you have your webserver configured to run PHP.

dist/index.js.map
dist/main.1f19ae8e.css.map
dist/main.1f19ae8e.js.map
dist/index.js
dist/main.1f19ae8e.css
dist/main.1f19ae8e.js
index.php

Notes on vrm info above

If you are using the vrm portal, then the installationID is in your existing url. Your user and pass are the same you use to login to the portal. Getting ptoken is a little convoluted as in my case I have 2 factor authentication turned on.

I have included a token-tool.php that might be useful for testing connections to the VRM API and for getting a ptoken needed for index.php.

This script has four steps where each step requires uncommenting that step and commenting out the other step can copying information from each step back into the script for the next step. At the end, you will end up with a ptoken that can be used in index.php.

Here is the VRM API documentation, but it took a few tries to figure it out hence the script.

https://docs.victronenergy.com/vrmapi/overview.html