GPS Odometer

This seems like a fairly simple project. A GPS device is built-in to the vehicle, and the vehicle's position is recorded at regular intervals, perhaps every 10 miles or so. A string of latitude and longitude characters and the mileage point would be written, which is not a large bit of data. Doing this every 10 miles would result in 10,000 records over 100,000 miles of vehicle use. Optionally the time could be recorded as well.

The information would be accessed through a port connection inside the vehicle, perhaps. Hook it up to a standard notebook computer, and run one of many software packages for vehicle travel analysis that would be available. Some very basic programs would just dump the text out in a file; others might generate a full color map with route lines and time shuttling, indicate the percentage of 'highway' or 'city' miles, etc.

There are several useful purposes for this. The most obvious one is a history report when purchasing 'pre-owned' vehicles. It would be useful to know if the little old lady in Gainesville, FL, who only drove the car to church on Sundays was withholding the fact that the church in question is in North Dakota.

This would be extremely useful for trip logging in the trucking industry. It might also have uses in criminal investigations. "Well, Mr. Smith, according to your car's GPS report, you WERE at the murder scene that night!"

Obviously there would need to be some Big Brother protection schemes in place to prevent misuse and unauthorized access of the information.