I am looking to build out a solution for my Volunteer Fire Brigade (CFA), who do a Santa Run throughout the neighbourhood at Christmas time. In previous years, we've had to staff the station to field calls from parents want to know where Santa was going in the Fire Trucks and where Santa was at that point.
My end goal is to have 9 different Google Maps JS representations (for 8 different Fire Trucks with a Santa on board that parents can click on and track the Santa coming closest to their home, and one map that consolidates and differentiates all routes for parents to see which of the 8 trucks will end up closest to their home), that show a planned path for each instance and one live location marker of a device on Santa's truck (most likely a mobile phone).
Each truck will obviously need to select which of the 8 routes it is doing, and that then shows the one instance of Santa moving around the map.
I've read a lot already within the Google API Docs, but I'm missing a few holes in my reading (Geolocation API is showing current device location, for example. I can't find in the docs how to broadcast the location of another device within a Map instance) and if it's possible to have live markers on a JavaScript instance of a map - or if this all has to be built within an Android/iOS environment.
My background is in Data Analytics and have minimal experience in Geospatial datasets, Google Maps API's and nil experience in App Dev. But I'm really wanting to solve this major problem for them so they can get more boots on the ground in the community for the actual run itself.
Related code knowledge is Python, JavaScript, JQuery and HTML/CSS.
Whatever I can take straight off the shelf to implement in this instance would be amazing.
if I'm correct you want to track your Santa and show their location on your dashboard and to your customers. for that, you can use the firebase Realtime database/ Firestore database where you will need a database from where your Santa's location will be written and your dashboard, as well as your customer's app, will read from.
and you can update marker position by calling " marker.setPosition(your coordinates); "