[Erv Plecter] likes to recreate movie props that actually work. This time around he’s making the motion detector device from the original Alien movie. You’ll immediately remember this prop after seeing and hearing it in the video after the break. For our money, the most brilliant part of that movie was the use of rhythmic sounds to boost the intensity of the tension in the viewer. [Erv’s] build captures that feeling, with the steady beat of sonar and the rising pitch of a ping as an object moves towards you. The device can easily track your own movement, as it contains both a GPS module and an electronic compass. He mentions that there is a motion sensor as well, but is a bit vague about how that part of the build works. Still, it’s a nice little piece which looks great despite not being quite finished yet.
gps hacks196 Articles
Black Rock City Navigator
Only a little bit out of season but better late than never! [Scott] brings us his Black Rock City Navigator. This unique bike mounted GPS device made for Burning Man 2010 features a servo driven array of LEDs. Two LED strips are used to cover the full 240 degrees of the C shaped city without modifying the servo, and are rotated over the different compass points.
It is powered by a pair of Freescale MC9S08AW32 micro controllers, and a unnamed GPS receiver. One controller deals with the servo and GPS data, the second simply drives the LEDs, and why not if you have plenty?
Housing the device is a four inch black sewer pipe end cap with a ball clamp attached, and is toped off with green acrylic engraved with the map of Black Rock City. Add some stickers (because stickers make everything better) and you have a functional device with a top-notch look for this year’s event.
Location Recorder And Mapper
[Jeroen’s] student project is a module that uses GPS tracking to create travel data on Google maps. It’s not really a spy device as the data isn’t transmitted, but would be a lot of fun to use on cycling and hiking adventures. A PIC 18F2550 reads location and altitude data from a GPS receiver as well as data from an accelerometer. This information can be displayed on an attached touchscreen display and it is also saved to a pair of EEPROMs. When you get back from your trip, the data pulled from the device via a serial connection is processed by [Jeroen’s] C# application and used to overlay the route on a google map. He’s got a source code package available for download but we’ve saved you the trouble if the schematic is all you’re after. It’s attached after the break.
Reverse Geocache Features UI And Is Reprogrammable
Reverse Geocaching Christmas Gift Box
This is the reverse geocache box that [William Dillon] built as a Christmas gift this year. He started with an interestingly shaped wooden box from the craft store. The clasp to keep it shut uses a servo motor on the lid with a wooden arm that grasps a screw on the base. As with the original geocache box, the Frustratomatic, and the smaller geocache, the box is designed to open only when in the correct geographic location thanks to the GPS module inside. That was a problem for [William] when a bug in his firmware locked the box during development while the key location was 1000 miles away. Luckily the box uses hinges that are attached from the outside with screws. We wonder how feasible it would be to use the mounting screws from the LCD screen to implement a coded emergency entry, using one as ground and the others as paths to microcontroller pins.
Location Tracking With Twitter And Google Maps
[Ryan O’Hara] built a location tracker he could use on motorcycle trips. Ostensibly this is to give his wife piece of mind be we think that was an excuse to play with GPS and SMS. To stand up to the trials of the road [Ryan] took his breadboarded prototype to the next level, using a manufactured board and a SparkFun enclosure. Tucked safely away is a PIC 18F25K20 gathering longitude and latitude from a GM862, formatting the info into a Google Maps link, and sending it to the Twitter feed via an SMS message. If you’re not familiar with the GM862, in addition to being a GPS module it can send and receive cellular data on a GSM network.
This is a nice solid hardware platform from which we can envision a couple of other hacks. The feed could be parsed to make a nice map graphic like the webpage for that Twittering Road Bike. It also might be nice to have a d-pad and character LCD to post your own tweets to the feed at the end of the day.
Ice Tube Clock GPS
Our favorite Soviet-Era display that found its way into a present-day kit now displays time from orbiting satellites. A GPS module patched into an Ice Tube Clock with modified firmware will be able to provide a satellite-synced time. The firmware, modified by yours truly, parses the GPS module’s NMEA RMC sentences for the time and date information and then updates the clock’s time and date. Fun was had making sure the alarm went off at the correct times when the time was updated by the GPS. Overall, it was a fun project and we look forward to seeing additional Ice Tube Clock hacks.