WhereAVR APRS tracker

posted May 8th 2009 11:26am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: gps hacks, transportation hacks

WhereAVR_Board

We posted a story about someone doing some APRS tracking recently. This is old news to some, but new fresh stuff for others. If you want to build your own tracker, here’s a great writeup on one. The WhereAVR is low cost, low power and has plenty of I/O. With all of the schematics and PCB files available on his site, you should be able to get one working in quickly. He does need a little help building a nice simple configuration tool to work in windows, anyone want to volunteer?

Comments [8]

tagged: APRS, gps

8 Responses to WhereAVR APRS tracker

DanAdamKOF says:

May 8, 2009 at 12:52 pm

“you should be able to get one working in quickly”

Fix your grammar man! lol

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Neil says:

May 8, 2009 at 1:57 pm

^ great reply dood

So, quick question for someone that knows, Since the source is written in C one could port this to arduino easily?

Thanks!

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jelengar says:

May 8, 2009 at 2:21 pm

wow, super great project. I’ll definitely use it in one of my incoming projects…

I do wonder however why did he bother to make R2R ladder since the same could be accomplished with PWM and 2 stage low pass filter. Although this solution would have similar component count it would be easier to implement in software… Does anyone know of any downside to using this approach?

Since he is using Atmega8 (same as arduino) there would no work at all to make it work with arduino. The only thing you have to change are frequencies calculations (or the crystal on arduino).

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DaJJHman says:

May 8, 2009 at 3:06 pm

@jelengar

the chip on an Arduino varies with model and revision number… also, the arduino environment makes a few changes before sending it to the board, so if he wants to use that code he has to make sure that the code will run in a test in the Arduino IDE first, unless he uses his own programmer…

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MaxLock says:

May 9, 2009 at 12:48 am

I posted this link to hackaday after seeing it, as I too would be interested in getting it to work in the arduino environment.

I’m particularly interested in how the zero crossing detector code would work, as this is a really useful approach for processing audio.

I think this could also make a nice weather station aprs node etc…

Theres another similar project here http://www.ringolake.com/pic_proj/zcd/zcdmodem.html

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strider_mt2k says:

May 9, 2009 at 4:33 am

Super good!

Go team venture!

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Bob says:

August 2, 2009 at 11:10 pm

This is hot.. I like the r2r ladder he made.. Getting a hold of a MX chip is like pulling teeth.. I was wondering myself how that could be accomplished via software.. Great project.. If I ever get around to making one, I will attempt to make a windows interface for it… ;) NICE WORK!