Lilygo T-SIM7000G Google Fi compatible Programmable GPS Tracker

hey everybody i hope you're having a fantastic day i know this is going to sound very instagrammy but i have been obsessing over the lilly go ttgo tsim7000g esp32 board and i know the entire world was talking about the raspberry pi pico and i didn't have my hands on one of those till one of you kind people sent me one yesterday but this board has been awesome um let me go over it real quick and show you a little bit about what this thing is and why i think it's so great first of all it is your typical esp32 board so it has all of the goodness it has the bluetooth it has the wi-fi it has the faster processor although this one may be underclocked to save power it is at its heart an esp32 with a bunch of pins broken out that you can use but obviously there's a lot more so this thing starting off on this side has usbc which i know a lot of you love but it's a very chunky heavy duty usbc connector pretty impressed by that it also has an sd card slot so right off the bat you can see that we're able to do some data logging and things like that it's got a reset button and a power button over here uh which is pretty interesting i never really used the power button then it has this whole chip over here and this is the 7000g now don't confuse that with any of the 700 series this is the 7000 series and as somebody who runs a an arduino facebook group i see posts of people just beating their heads against the wall with the sim 700 and sim 800 gps modules and gsm modules that are out there on the market some of them are 2g and things like that just sim card incompatibilities bad software examples people love the idea of them but i've seen so many people struggle with how to use these gsm and gps boards but this is different this is the 7000 g and i'm going to get back to why that's important in a moment it does have this sim card this nano sim card slot and so now you can see that we're starting to do some very cool things and then coming around this side we have a power switch and the reason why we have a power switch is because right here we have a place to put a charging cable now what makes the charging cable special is that this thing is designed to be charged with solar that's right so this has solar battery management charging on it and you would say well where do you plug the battery in kapow you plug the battery in back here now this is not my first esp32 with a battery on it but when you start packing all this stuff together this is pretty powerful just a note it does use the non-protected cells you really can't squeeze i mean you might be able to but squeezing one of these protected cells in there would be fairly difficult but you don't need the protection because this thing does it for you so you're able to use cells that you salvaged out of a ryobi battery or a laptop or something like that so what makes this thing really special besides all the parts that are on the board it has full on lte which means that you can send text messages you can place phone calls and you can send data to the cloud now what makes that really interesting is this right here google phi so i am a google phi subscriber and one of the least known features about being a google phi subscriber is that you can have up to five data only sim cards which means that if you're already a subscriber you can get up to five of these and you can have free lte data on your iot devices how awesome is that i used one of these things in africa and i streamed something like 18 gigs of data over a couple of day period in africa off google phi did not get charged a penny and so this makes this crazy powerful because all of a sudden you can put a giant battery on this thing you can put it in a field you can hook a solar charger up to it and you can be constantly connected now it does come with uh both the gps antenna and the uh lte antenna i can tell you the lte is pretty stout because meredith the office cat got a hold of it and chewed it and it still worked perfectly after that i think she happened to miss the right traces uh but she apologizes she says that she's sorry and uh anyway this thing works awesome so when i got this thing i sort of braced myself for coding hell again i run a group of 140 000 makers and i see so many problems with the sim 700 and the sim 800 but this thing was about as easy as you could get so they give you an example sketch that tests all the features so you can pop the sketch on it's going to test the gps it's going to test the lte it's going to go through and test the sd card and so you automatically have example sketches on how to use all of the various features now they also do provide some sketches to get you in some various existing iot platforms i think blink is one of them there's also cayenne and stuff like that and so just super easy i was connected to lte within one minute of plugging this board into my computer which is pretty impressive now the one thing to note it is a little tricky because you can't develop gps indoors you're not going to get gps signal indoor with this thing and so i eventually wound up putting it out on the workbench outside my office which is where a cat got a hold of it so that is a hazard of developing this type of thing but uh once you once you have it up and running there's just you can make simple calls and find out how much voltage is coming in on your solar panel how much power is left in your battery in all these different states as well as sending gps information so in my initial test with this thing i wrote an api that would accept latitude and longitude from this thing and i was able to take it around i'm obviously not going to share my live data but i was able to take this thing around and every 30 seconds it was sending uh the latitude and longitude up to the server and did not have a single issue i'll be happy to give you the sketch to do that um but this thing is just awesome so the possibilities with this board are pretty much endless if you need lte or gps i think this is the way to go i've used some of the other gps boards and i got them all running but this thing was just easier like i said this thing came to me from banggood it runs about 40 bucks on banggood i have an affiliate link in the description super helpful to me if you use that link i did try ordering this from a few of the other usual people and it just got returned every single time i was never actually able to get my hands on one but banggood delivered and so um this thing is a very very exciting board very easy to get up and running with my gps and my lte now i did talk about google phi and if you're a google fi customer it's a no because this is absolutely free but you're not obligated to use google fi you can use any of the lte character you can use any of the lte carriers that support the bands that this thing supports so thank you to banggood for sending this to me i'll have some code in the description that you guys can play around with i didn't try to optimize it for this particular project because i'm doing something different with it but i will give you the basics to send your latitude and longitude up to an api and uh yeah this thing if you need it if you need these features this thing is a buy buy buy buy buy and i don't say that very often on this channel most i'm like if you wanna this is a buy it's an awesome awesome board so hey thanks for watching have a great day

Channel: AnotherMaker

Views: 18,105

Keywords: arduino gps, arduino gsm, arduino lte, arduino fi, arduino googlefi, arduino google fi, arduino battery, esp32 lte, esp32 gsm, esp32 gps, esp32 tracker, esp32 tracking, diy tracker, diy tracking device, arduino tracking

Id: uMXzOegaY6U

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021