Recording environmental data of a package in transit

[Halcyon]

I've always wondered what a package/mail "gets up to" when it's sent through the postal system, especially long distances. For example, what would data such as temperature, humidity, G-forces, orientation, altitude and speed show? It'd be interesting to be able to see where a package goes once it leaves the post office (granted that a lot of the time a GPS fix probably isn't possible) and the enviromental factors that it's exposed to.

Has anyone ever conducted such an experiment?

EDIT: Sorry, idiot me posted this in the wrong section. Can it be moved to the 'General' section.

[stmdude]

Plenty of people have.

ASTM D4169-01, ISO 13355-2003 and MIL-STD-810-G document shipping vibration, temperatures, humidity, shocks, etc pretty well.

Our company uses ISO 13355-2003 as a benchmark to test our products resilience to shipping and such.  Parts have been known to resonate at frequencies that can be found on lorries for example.

[SeanB]

Well, you get tags that are credit card size, and which record temperature and humidity in transit, saving it all to an internal memory. Not too bad price wise ( unless you are paying in ZAR of course) and they are reusable, though the internal battery on them is non replaceable, lasting around 5 years.

[Fungus]

Those Maxim iButtons are designed for this:

https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/products/comms/ibutton.html

Not exactly cheap though. I'm sure there's alternatives.


Edit: Well, OK, not GPS position...

[station240]

You can also get Gshock stickers and tilt detect stick on mechanical devices.