Paper Tracker

The Paper Tracker is a system for tracking documents inside buildings. It uses WiFi Access Points to calculate the documents' current location and links it to the current step in its workflow.

It consists of a hardware tracker, a backend server and a mobile application for Android and iOS.

Getting started

You need to get a Tracker (the hardware device), install the backend application on a server and download the app for your phone.

The Server

Download the pre-built server application for Linux, place it on a server and run it. It will listen for HTTP requests on port 8080, so go ahead and visit your-server.domain:8080, which links all the other downloads you'll need.

Note that the server also listens for CoAP requests on port 5688, so you might need to allow UDP requests to that port in your servers firewall.

You could also install Go and build the server yourself by running make or make run in the server/ directory. This way, you can run the server on Windows and MacOS as well.

Additionally there is a Dockerfile available in the server folder. The docker also uses 8080 as http and 5688 as CoAP port default. The config file and database are located in the /config folder.

For individually configuring the server, you can use the config_example.toml as template and rename it to config.toml. Information about the available parameters are available through the --help command of the server executable.

The Tracker

The tracker is built out of a TinyPICO, which is an ESP32-based development board and a LiPo battery. If you have a Tracker, download the Firmware Flasher for Linux or Windows, extract the ZIP file and run the flasher application. It will ask you for WiFi credentials and a path to the firmware directory, which is bundled in the given ZIP file. For flashing, you'll need to have PlatformIO Core installed. After flashing the tracker, it will automatically connect to the server, if the given WiFi credentials are correct.

The App

The app is written in Flutter and thus is available for Android and iOS. However, prebuilt apps only exist for Android. You can download them from Github Releases, an explanation of which download you'll need is given on the server's download page.

Licensing

This repository contains multiple sub-projects (folders), each of which has its own LICENSE file, denoting which license is used for the specific sub-project. The TL;DR is: Code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, the paper (everything in the paper/ directory) is under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.