gps hacks

207 Articles

ArduPilot Pro Autonomous Drone

October 5, 2008 by 10 Comments

We wrote about [Chris Anderson] before when he released the Arduino based autopilot. He has since crashed his first Predator UAV, due to an underpowered motor and poor control of the v-tail only steering. He has since released a pro version of the autopilot controller, and is modifying this UAV Predator drone kit to work with it. One ATMega168 processor handles flying and the other handles GPS navigation, but because they work together, it results in a fully autonomous drone. He also has a BlimpDuino version we have covered before.

GPS Alarm Clock

September 19, 2008 by 5 Comments

We spotted an interesting app in Gizmodo’s iPhone roundup for the week. iNap is designed for commuters that don’t want to miss their train stop. Just pick any location you can find on Google Maps, set the distance for the alert radius and the alarm tone, and it’s ready. It’s a great app and only costs $1.

The app actually reminds us of the first time we heard about Bug Labs. The modular gadget building system was described to us as a way to build unconventional consumer electronics. They specifically talked about one person that built an alarm clock with GPS because he kept falling the asleep on the train. Thanks to convergence we’re seeing a lot of devices expand from their initial intentions, whether it’s an iPhone GPS alarm clock or an N95 being used auto upload your bike ride to Flickr.

High Altitude Photographic Balloon

September 6, 2008 by 6 Comments

[Earl Foster] recently completed his 4th high altitude photographic balloon (HAPB-4) launch. This launch reached a peak altitude of 106,384 feet, and lasted about 3 hours. The final weight of the capsule was 5lb 3-3/8 oz, with all the electronics, GPS, digital camera, and HD video camera. His balloons operate under the exempt rules of FAA Part 101 subpart a governing unmanned balloon flight. This program has been setup to encouraging interest in science, mathematics, and engineering through unmanned ballooning. HAPB-4 uses a Parallax SPIN Stamp microcontroller, this multicore chip offers eight 32-bit processors (cogs) sharing 32kB RAM and ROM. Having eight separate COG’s allows him to log GPS data, control the camera, log and monitor sensors, and control LCD functions simultaneously with minimal hardware. During this flight he did have some equipment failures, but he was still able to capture some nice pictures.

MioPocket 2.0 Release 27

September 5, 2008 by 19 Comments

Miopocket Screenshot

GpsPasSion forum member [Ospray] has released a new version of MioPocket. For those of you that don’t know, MioPocket is a great unlock kit for GPS units. It basically unlocks the hidden potential of your GPS so you can access the built-in functionality of a PDA as well as retaining the GPS software. This means you can play music, watch video, play games, read and write office documents, and many other things with the once single-purpose device.

Originally written for Mio brand devices, it has been successfully used on a couple other brands. We’ve seen it on a Navigon 2100 using a modified install. This software can run directly off the SD card, so it can easily be updated or removed.

The fun part is fiddling with the scripts to get the newest releases to work on the Navigon and Magellan devices.

Ardupilot: Arduino Based UAV Autopilot

July 3, 2008 by 5 Comments


A short while back, [Chris Anderson] released an Arduino based autopilot. It rings in fairly cheap and being open source, you can tweak away. To add more functionality, he’s releasing a dual core version. Thanks to the second processor, it no longer requires an external hardware co-pilot. It uses an on-board GPS and features an ATtiny based fail safe. It’s still under development, but he’s made the design files available.

GPS Logging Arduino Shield

June 28, 2008 by 6 Comments


ladyada continues to produce more and more interesting Arduino shields. This new GPS logger plugs into a standard Arduino board and has support for four different GPS receiver modules. On the backside of the board is an SD card slot where it stores the coordinates in a text file. The total runtime can vary from five hours to twenty depending on how you choose to power the device and how you use the device. How often you read the device and whether you maintain the GPS lock will affect the power consumption. Like all of ladyada’s projects, you’ll find a great construction guide and example code on her site.