Here’s a short guide for converting a Palm III GPS sled into a normal serial GPS receiver. The Palm III is old tech so its accessories can be picked up cheap and modified for other purposes. The GPS receiver needs to be separated from the Palm specific board and a few components need to be transfered between the two. Once that’s done you should have a standard serial GPS receiver. Here’s a cache in case the “Read” link fails.
[thanks nevamore, who has done this hack with success]
this site shows you how to jack in to the gps receiver inside any gm onstar system. it’s as simple as soldering a up a serial cable. you can then connect to it and either run some gps diagnostic software, or switch the device to nmea mode so that you can use it with your gps mapping software in your car pc.
if you’ve got an onstar system but aren’t paying for the service this might be just the hack for you. thanks for the link leo!
if you’ve got a gameboy advance, a gba flash cartridge, and a gps receiver that outputs nmea, then you can turn your gameboy advance into a cool gps mapping receiver.
mikhail sharonov created a nice litle application that assists you in importing and calibrating up to 20 raster maps. the software will then output a gba rom file that you can run on your device. with a few minor software updates, he was also able to get the microsoft branded gps to work (the one which comes with microsoft streets and trips 2005). hot!
if you’re into geocaching, terraserver and google maps can be your greatest allies. well, maybe second greatest, right after your trusty gps receiver. with terraserver, you can pull up hires satellite photos and topo maps of just about everywhere in the continental us. with google maps, you can easily pull up a road map and driving directions.
however, one thing i noticed when google maps launched was that it’s interface is conspicuously lacking a lat/lon entry field. it turns out there are a couple of query parameters that you can use to pull up coordinate based maps. with this info, you can make a simple form to pull up both map results for a given latitude/longitude combination, which should hopefully be a handy tool for your next gps treasure hunt. continue reading to see how this works.
Continue reading “Howto: Geocaching With Google And Terraserver”
“i found it in my cow pasture, buried in the snow. i was riding my 4 wheeler.” that’s what the postcard said when it returned to me after i sent it up with a helium balloon a couple weeks ago. it traveled roughly 100 miles.
but i digress.
james meehan’s story began quite similarly, but he decided to take his balloon fascination to a much more fascinating and hackerly level. follow the link to read about how he designed and constructed his linux powered weather balloon, complete with gps, packet radio uplink, and video camera. he says it’s the coolest thing he’s ever done. i can’t really vouch for what else he’s done, but this project is pretty darn cool.
when you’ve finished marvelling at this hack, make sure to also check out the home brew, high altitude glider we wrote about a while back. i love this high altitude mischief. if you know of similar projects, send ’em in!
there are incredible hacks and then there are projects so unreal that the term hack just doesn’t seem appropriate.
this one fits squarely into the latter category and i’m posting it anyway.
art vanden berg details 4 years of designing a balloon launched glider that flies itself to a safe landing point using custom software running on a pc104 setup with a gps receiver, quickcam, 35mm camera, and packet radio. mission control is equally impressive with more custom software that tracks telemetry data, downloads real-time quickcam stills, and provides manual override of normal flight operation if necessary.
Continue reading “Homebrew, Autonomous, High Altitude Glider”
here’s one for the mac peeps. i’ve received a few emails asking about how to get a gps to work on a mac and then writing a custom interface to display the data. macromedia flash “could” work but director is better at handling and manipulating bitmaps, so that being said–i dug up this example using a garmin eTrex vista and keyspan serial to usb adaptor.
