Hello,

I started to use Home Assistant some time ago and I use a MQTT broker with OwnTracks to do somes device tracking.  It’s good for IOS and Android plateform, but sometime we need to track something else. I may forget my phone, but not my car if i’m away from home.

I didn’t find article about using OwnTracks and Home-Assistant to manually update physical device tracking, so I created a very small PHP script to update position. This script use Mosquitto\Client() from PECL to publish an owntracks location update. I use a custom script to parse car tracking website app to extract the position of my car ($last variable). Dont ask me the source code, I don’t want to publish it (« unofficial reverse api from the mobile app »).

The result is not so bad

Here the source code :

$client = new \Mosquitto\Client(); 
$client->setCredentials("login", "password");
$client->connect("mqtt.iot.local", 1883, 5);
$json = array(
  "_type" => "location",
  "acc" => 25,
  "alt" => $last->position->altitude,
  "batt" => 100,
  "cog" => $last->position->heading,
  "desc" => "",
  "event" => "",
  "lat" => $last->position->latitude,
  "lon" => $last->position->longitude,
  "rad" => 0,
  "t" => "a",
  "tid" => "RO",
  "tst" => $last->dateTime,
  "vac" => 0,
  "vel" => $last->speed
);
$output = json_encode($json);
$client->loop();
$mid = $client->publish('owntracks/francois/rogue', $output);
$client->loop();
$client->disconnect();
unset($client);