Which machines worked yesterday, and for how long was the engine just running?
An excavator on hire is billed by the hour. A transit mixer idling at the batching plant burns diesel for nothing. A backhoe that leaves site at 2 a.m. is a police complaint. All three show up in the same few numbers.
The machine register
The four questions a plant manager asks every morning, as columns. The rows are an example written for this page, not a customer's fleet.
| Machine | Site | Engine hours | Idle | Last position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EX-04 excavator | Hinjewadi plot 3 | 9.4 | 38 % | 4 min ago |
| BH-02 backhoe | Wakad flyover | 6.1 | 12 % | 2 min ago |
| TM-07 transit mixer | Batching plant | 7.8 | 51 % | 1 min ago |
| DT-11 dumper | Hinjewadi plot 3 | 0.0 | 0 % | 9 h ago |
DT-11 is the row to ring about first: no engine time and no position for nine hours is a machine that is parked with its tracker off, or one that is somewhere else.
Where each column comes from
- Engine hours
- Engine-on time from the tracker's ignition line, split into moving and idle, per machine, per day. On vehicles whose CAN bus the FMB150 can read, the engine's own hour meter as well. If you hire machines out by the hour, the engine-hours report is the record you and the hirer can both look at.
- Idle
- Engine on, machine not travelling. The report has an idle percentage column. Read it with care on an excavator, which works for hours without moving its tracks: there, idle means "engine on and stationary", and a replay coloured by engine RPM, where CAN data exists, separates digging from waiting.
- Site
- Each site is a geofence. Entry and exit are recorded, and the dwell report adds up hours per site, which is how a machine's cost gets split across projects. For tippers on haul runs, distance by group.
- Last position
- How old the latest fix is. A machine that has stopped reporting appears in the non-reporting vehicles report, and a cut to the tracker's power raises its own alert.
- Out of the ordinary
- Each night every machine is compared with its own last 28 days. A day of idling far above its usual becomes a finding in the inbox the next morning.
02:10, and a machine is moving.
What reaches you, in order, when a machine is loaded onto a trailer at night.
"Vehicle moved without authorisation"
A tracker that is armed or immobilised and then moves raises this alarm. It goes to the top of the inbox as critical and stays there until somebody deals with it.
The site exit
A rule on the site geofence, limited to the equipment group, emails or messages the site in-charge on Telegram the moment it happens.
The trail
The live map shows where it is going and how fresh the position is. The replay keeps the whole route for the police report.
The immobiliser, if a relay is fitted
Stopping the engine remotely needs a user you have allowed to immobilise, and a second confirmation. Every attempt is recorded with who sent it and when, including refused ones. Send it to a parked machine, never one on the move.
Fuel
On CAN-fitted vehicles: fuel level in litres, a refuel report, and suspected drains with a confidence on each. A separate list shows the drops the classifier refused to call theft because they looked like a sensor fault. Keep that list in front of you before anyone is accused.
PTO and the CAN bus
On a tipper or a transit mixer whose CAN bus reports it, "PTO engaged" is one of the signals you can colour a replay by. The CAN activity report shows when the tracker's CAN connection was present and when it was pulled, because a tracker can keep sending GPS with its CAN wiring cut.
Which machines give CAN data. Trucks, tippers and mixers on a standard CAN bus generally do. Many excavators and loaders use their maker's own variant, and on those you still get position, ignition, movement and engine hours from ignition time, without fuel or RPM. Ask us about a specific model before you buy trackers for it.
Tell us what is on your sites.
Send the list of machines with make and model. We will tell you which ones will give engine data, which will give only position and ignition, and what that means for the reports you want.
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