Does anyone know how we could go about doing this?  It would really help us from the standpoint of matching vehicles with Devices.

Are you asking how you expose this info in the application or how you actually query the device for the vehicle’s VIN? Keep in mind this isn’t a 100% guaranteed solution since the device can’t retrieve the VIN across all vehicle makes and models.

We definitely realize this information is not always available.

We were wondering in situations where it was….  Both how do we query the info and how do we expose it. Thank you!

The device will try to query VIN from the OBD port every time the ignition is turned on.  This does not mean it will always get it.  If the vehicle’s ignition has never been turned on, VIN will not be a populated field even if the device could have acquired VIN from the make/model in question.

There are 3 ways the device can send VIN.  Programatically via GPS Lock event & Heartbeat event, or the +XT:7002 SMS query.

Once the “vin” is populated it will need to be triggered into your application database. This post should steer you in the right direction:

http://dev.numerex.com/code-snippets/article/getting-additional-data-values-from-xirgo-devices/

Hi Dennis,

We have implemented this as described, including the db_procs addition to copy over the VIN values into our readings table.  Currently we have a device that’s on staging and the VIN got a value “0” on GPS Lock.  Can you tell us what this means and why it’s not a VIN as expected?

On the production server in the xirgo database I can see there are actual VIN values, so I’m wondering if this has something to do with the device’s setup on the staging server.

Thanks in advance.

Dennis,

As Tim mentioned, we have tried to query the device via GPS Lock as the method. 

Am I reading Andrew’s post above correctly in thinking that the vehicle has to be ON while obtaining GPS lock for this to work correctly?

@ADS79 - Yes VIN can only be read from the OBD port if ignition is on. 

If GPS Lock is acquired before ignition is ever turned on, VIN will not have been read and as such the GPS Lock event message will not contain VIN.  Heartbeats and 7002 responses that happen after an ignition on event will, if possible, have VIN.

VIN isn’t a well-supported OBD feature and successfully retrieving seems to vary greatly by make/model.

We got it to work!  You are right, however, in that there are vehicles that don’t have that info provided…..... if that is the case, we are given a “0”