I got a chance to field test the GPS unit yesterday. Overall I’m quite happy with how things went. Even though it’s quite large for a GPS unit, the box fits nicely into my small pack, and everything functioned fairly well during the hike.
I can already see that the buttons need to be recessed somehow. [...]
Now that the hardware side is pretty much wrapped up I wanted to build a simple enclosure so that I could start field testing. I’ve already spent way too much time trying to find a prebuilt enclosure that would fit the components nicely. As I get further along with my projects I’ll write more about [...]
After two evenings (late into the night) of soldering and de-soldering and re-soldering, I have the hardware side of the project pretty much complete. Here’s the entire setup; in this shot I had everything pushed in tightly to get an idea of the final size. You can see the electrical tape [...]
The last post brings us up to speed on this project. I have quite a bit more work to do over the next few weeks to get it finished up:
I need to finish up the hardware side of the project: This will happen over the next few days, as I have a large order of [...]
Another task on my “to do” list was to work out the various settings that could be enabled on the GPS receiver itself. After a bit of research I decided that I was only interested in the RMC and GGA outputs.
I was already getting the RMC data which gave me latitude, longitude, ground speed, track [...]
My next task was to get the partially functioning battery monitoring code worked out. I made several different attempts to work out something that I was happy with, before finally settling on the current solution, which may get changed yet again!
Basically the monitor pin on the Lithium Backpack outputs the current voltage of the [...]
The Lithium Backpack from Liquidware is a pretty straight forward affair. It has outputs for +3.3, +5, and ground, along with a status pin. I added three more wires to the “shield” that I created for the LCD. This brought the +5 and ground pins from the backpack, to the corresponding pins on the [...]
So my shiny new replacement Bluetooth module was in, including a return shipping label for the bad one! I hooked it up, and after a few minutes realized that it had the same symptoms as the “bad” one laying on my desk.
After some testing, including multiple reboots, installing putty, and a quickly thrown together .NET [...]
One of the great things about Arduino is the maturity of the product, and the user base that has grown up around it. I have found that there aren’t many problems that others haven’t already solved, and there is a large base of libraries available to do many of the chores that need to be [...]
I should point out now, that if you are interested building a cheap GPS unit, this isn’t the path that you should follow; In the US at least, you could purchase a mid range GPS unit for about the same amount of money that I have into this device, not to mention the hours spent [...]