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Future of GPS Mass Transit Tracker

Currently the GPS Mass Transit Tracker is in basic project to show the technology available can support the idea of being able to track buses and provide real time data of the buses location. The GPS Mass Transit Tracker has potential to become a complete package available to transit companies to track their entire fleet of buses through even the most urban areas. An improvement to our design would be to add a graphical output of the data to show the movement of the buses. A map can be used with buses being represented by numbers or symbols that move in real time showing the exact location of the bus. The radio communication of the product would have to be brought to a much more powerful level to allow communication between all the buses throughout a densely populated area such as NYC. The GPS Mass Transit Tracker has a lot of buisness potential because it is the only tracker to use RF communication versus telephone line communication which is very expensive. The savings alone is enough to pursue the idea of the GPS Mass Transit Tracker further to create a commmercial product.

Lessons learned

When working on a project with a deadline it is always important to get all of your parts as early as possible. Never expect to get parts in time no matter how sure the supplier is that they have it in in stock and that it will be shipped out next day air. Companies will do anything to sell a part to a customer and they could care less about the project or deadline that needs to be met. Get as many sources for parts as early as possible and choose the most reliable source to order from. Waiting to order a part can be a problem due to specific parts being discontinued or defunct. Our group ran into some situations where a part was discontinued and a newer version of the part became available. However, our design incorporated the old part and the group was stuck having to work around the new part to make it functional with our design. It is also important to note that prices and student discounts are sometimes only offered for a certain periods of time and should be taken advantage of. Many sources offer student discounts and depending on the person selling the product more can be had for free or at a great discount. These offers can be refused if a company goes through a bad sales quarter where the company is losing money. Therefore it is important to take advantage of free parts and student discounts whenever possible.

Another valuable experience that our group learned from was the loss of a group member. This is a difficult problem to pick up on unless the group member expresses a disinterest in the project. Our group member joined our group approximately three weeks into the semester so our project had already been underway. Still, the person show much interest in the project and had many good ideas and seemed very motivated. There was no sign of the group member being disinterested or showing any sign of leaving the group. It was not until after winter break that we got an email from our advisor saying that group member had left our group. The person did not notify anyone else in the group of his desire to leave the group and he was of importance to the programming aspect of the project. Our group had to make a lot of decisions to decide whether we could accomplish that persons part in the project. However, we are a motivated group and decided to work around the problem instead of letting it bring the project down. Lesson to be learned is sometimes it is impossible to tell how other group members will react and it is very important to be focused on the project and be ready to take on additional workloads if necessary in order to bring the project to completion.