I2C Arduino GPS Shield

i2c_gps_shield

[Wayne] wrote in to share an item he just finished working on, an I2C GPS shield for the Arduino. While other GPS solutions have existed for quite some time, his caught our eye due to its feature list.

The shield removes a good bit of the hassle associated with parsing raw NMEA data from traditional GPS addons. While you have the option to communicate with the GPS module over serial in order to obtain the raw data, the use of the I2C interface makes getting the most commonly used GPS data a breeze. The GPS module itself can be set to update at anywhere from 1 to 10 Hz, and [Wayne] says that the I2C bus blows away the oft-used 9600 baud serial interface. While I2C is primarily used for receiving data, it can also be utilized to configure the GPS via its control registers, allowing for on the fly settings tweaks.

While he does sell the units pre-assembled at a competitive price, [Wayne] also provides a full schematic, making this an easy afternoon project once you have sourced the proper components.

11 thoughts on “I2C Arduino GPS Shield

  1. So you could pay extra for on board data parsing or just use the TinyGPS library and a string tokenizer for free. If you don’t want to eat up your serial I/O just use the Software Serial library as well.

    i guess if you have piles of money laying around this would be great.

  2. If you read the product page you’ll see that it has stackable headers. You can see the female part in the picture. Under the shield are male headers to connect to the Arduino (or another shield) below. The antenna wouldn’t be under a circuit board unless you stacked something on top. It’s pretty common to see a full set of headers on shields so you can still access all of the pins that are inherently covered by the shield itself.

  3. Now if he would have just added some accelerometers and a connector for a Wii Motion plus to plug in. It is not a bad price for a limited market devices like this.

  4. I2C was developed by Philips back in the early 80s as a means of simplifying communication between devices on a printed circuit board. It was first used in Philips consumer electronics (i.e. CD players) not only as an internal data bus but also as a means of controlling external devices. It only needs one pair of wires for each direction and supports up to 1024 devices on a single bus.

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