gps hacks

205 Articles

GPS USB Port Repair

September 17, 2009 by 19 Comments

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[Jair2k4] learned the hard way not to lend out your expensive GPS to untrustworthy people. His Garmin 200 was returned with a broken USB port and unable to charge. Luckily, all it took was some inventive thinking and he had it repaired in no time. By breaking open a Nokia cellphone car charger, he had a source of 5 volts. After that, it was only a matter of soldering the connections. However, not content with the design he pulled out a Dremel and mounted it in his 1991 Suzuki Sidekick. Quick, dirty, and actually working afterwords, just the way we like it.

Pictures From Space For $150

September 13, 2009 by 47 Comments

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Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth;  their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts.

Harry Potter Marauders Map Realized

September 5, 2009 by 19 Comments

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After reading about cheap wireless for microcontrollers, [Leigh] left a comment about his Marauders map. Much like the Harry Potter version, whoever holds the ‘map’ is able to see the location of the ‘marauders’ within certain bounds. Unlike the magical version however, each person being tracked needs to hold a PICAXE 08M, GPS, and 433.92MHz transmitter: while the map needs a computer running his Python script and a receiver of the same frequency. It has the potential for locating people, but we feel it might be better off in a swarm robotics setup.

Google Maps Adds Arterial Traffic Monitoring

August 25, 2009 by 15 Comments

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Traffic monitoring has been available on Google Maps for some time, but has been limited to highways and major roads. According to the Google LatLong blog, traffic tracking support is now available for smaller surface roads in select cities. The data is gathered through mobile phones running My Location. Anybody wishing to help out can sign up their phone and opt into My Location to participate in the anonymous data collection. Now you won’t have to gamble on whether or not your back road alternative route is congested when there’s construction on the freeway. Dash tried something similar with their two-way traffic reporting, but we’re guessing that Google’s version will have even better performance thanks to a rapidly increasing install base.

Keychain GPS Finder

June 25, 2009 by 7 Comments

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With a user interface consisting of two buttons and a three digit display, the GPS finder guides the user back to a saved location. Nine locations can be saved for navigation recall. Press a button to save location and press another button to recall. Each switch has a secondary function, for management purposes such as memory indexes and power features. An AarLogic GPS 3A module and AVR microcontroller make up the guts. With the popularity of Geocaching, this would make an impressive trinket; Leading the hunter to an undocumented treasure.

WhereAVR APRS Tracker

May 8, 2009 by 8 Comments

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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?