Those of you in the UK will be all to familiar with the number of speed (sorry safety) cameras springing up everywhere. You're probably also aware of products such as Road Angel which make use of GPS and a database of camera and accident blackspot locations to warn of excessive speed on approach.

These commercial products are pretty expensive (£300 - £500), have an annual subscription cost for database updates and look pretty tacky perched on the dashboard. So how about the diy option?

I just came across this site: http://www.pocketgps.co.uk/uksafetycameras.php which would seem to sort out the camera database problem.

Take an empeg, a gps receiver, gpsd and perhaps a custom bit of development and the whole thing could be integrated into the empeg, for just the cost of a GPS unit.

I really fancy having a crack at this as a project, but could do with a few pointers to start with. I seem to recall many moons ago some activity around the gps application, with a view to split it into a separatefrontend/backend. Did this ever occur?

I'm thinking of a custom app that would bind to hijack, have its own database of danger locations (not too worried about direction of travel at the moment), and listen quietly in the background to data from a backend gps process.

As we approach a camera location, it could check current vehicle speed using GPS and display a suitable graphic onscreen and play a suitable sound sample as appropriate.

Any audio/visual feedback could get more insistent as we approach the camera, and then hush once we're past it. Adding a "hush" button would be handy for false alarms.

Of course, it would be really nice to know the speed limit for the camera too, but that's missing from the current database. Maybe there's another source of road speed limit data?

Another nice feature would be an overspeed warning - this could be set to warn of going over 40mph through the current dreary m25 roadworks for example.

I'm hoping that some of this functionality already exists in other empeg projects - perhaps it could all be done within gpsd?

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Andrew.