GPS Android Players

Hey there, hope you’re all doing well.

I’ve got 40 Android players set up, and I’m looking to automatically get their locations so each one can display the weather based on where it is. I’ve already taken care of the setup for OpenWeatherMap, and all the players have their GPS turned on. What’s the best way to configure everything to make this work smoothly? Any tips or steps I should follow would be greatly appreciated!

I’ve not tried this specifically with xibo, but the process should work fine regardless of the platform. We built our weather asset in html instead and the html would pull the location data via the browser whenever it’s displayed.

Just enable location services for your xibo application and boom.

In my use case the android devices are always moving and travel about 1500kms per session so the weather can be vastly different depending where you are.

Another way you could possibly do this is to build middleware that will collect the gps co-ordinates for all 40 players and at intervals you decide use the API to update the player lat long in your cms.

I made the assumption these devices are in motion If that’s not the case my suggestion might be overkill, or if they’re indoor i would just set the location manually in the CMS.

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Hi Jon,

Thank you for your message and your valuable insights. I apologize for the delay in responding.

Would you be able to share the program or code you used for collecting GPS coordinates and integrating them into the CMS? It would be really helpful to see how you implemented this solution.

Best regards from Brazil,

If your android device supports location services, then Xibo will automatically request permission to use location (network and/or GPS) and add the details to the CMS for you.

If this is not working, then it is likely your device does not support location services, which would make obtaining the location challenging, but perhaps solvable via a GPS dongle or similar.

Hey Dan!
My Android device is capable of capturing location data, but it isn’t being included in the CMS. Is there anything I can do manually to check and resolve this issue?

We set up our devices when we set up xibo, or chromium for that matter to allow location services. When our weather html asset comes up in rotation it gets the location reported by the hardware.

But like I was saying in my opinion if it’s only 40 indoor devices that don’t move around, it’s probably faster just to geocode them and update it in the CMS yourself.

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I’d enable auditing for one of the displays and search the logs for messages from XFA:GeoManager.

As Jon says, if the units do not move, it might be easier to manually set the location on the display record.

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