Recently we observed that some of our boards we got assembled were exhibiting a strange behaviour, The boards randomly stopped working after sometime of soldering process.  We observed that these boards only work when we heated the pads or gave touch up with soldering iron, but again they used to stop working after they have cooled down. 

We designed a OBD GPS tracker for a client in Australia. The requirements were very clear on what needs to be done and they wanted all the features present on the VALTRACK-V2. Basically, all my GPS trackers are the variants of the VALTRACK-V2 GPS tracker. Here are a few things i want to share about the design we did and the process we followed to get the prototypes working,

This post is about some of the design mistakes which I did in designing my GPS trackers and this mistake is associated with selection for the battery charger chips. I am sharing this so that you will be careful and aware when choosing the battery charger chips for your GSM based applications. 

We designed a new version of the VALTRACK V2 GPS tracker, This version is called VALTRACK-V2B because this will not have internal battery support and this device is specifically made for vehicles. There have been a few modifications and upgrades in the desing, lets look at what they are,

In this post i will show you guys how we can automatically synchronize the RTC of our GSM module with the network time. This method is very useful if we are using a board that doesnt have battery backup present on it. Once the GSM module RTC is synchronized, we can also sync the MCU RTC and also any external RTC if we are using one.

I had been extensively using the MMA8652 accelerometer in my design because of its small size, easy interface and low cost. The accelerometer fits the bill correctly in most of my designs. It has appeared in many of my projects including my VALTRACK-V2 GSM/GPS tracker. But its no longer easily available after the merger of Freescale Semiconductors with NXP Semiconductors.