gps

345 Articles

GP3X To Be Released In October

August 28, 2008 by 9 Comments


You should be able to get your hands on your Wiz as soon as October. The Wiz, also known as the GP3X is the highly anticipated follow up to the GP2X, a handheld game system that runs linux. Sporting a 533 MHz ARM processor, 64 MB of RAM, a 2.8 inch OLED display, 5 hour battery life, and 16 GB of storage, its a heck of a deal. Where else can you get a portable with those specs, bundled with Flash player 7, DivX, Xvid, and MPEG playback for $179?

These units are supposed to be as hackable as the previous version. We’ve seen GPS and USB ports added as well as qtopia and Windows 95 run on them.

Correction: the 16GB of storage on the Engadget site is a typo. This unit comes with 1GB.

[via Engadget]

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.

Dash Express Now Twittering

June 17, 2008 by 6 Comments


Here’s a quick hack to satiate our appetite for location aware applications. The Dash Express is a GPS unit with cellular and WiFi radios so it can do two way communication. Out of the box it can download maps and traffic on the fly. A little while ago they opened up the API so the device could receive info from other web services and owners could give feedback, like reporting speed traps live. The handy hack embedded above publishes your location to Twitter; we would have preferred it hit an actual location service like Brightkite. This just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible applications. We wonder what the adoption rate of the Dash Express will be, since the iPhone also has a touchscreen, GPS, and of course a cellular connection.

We’ve got a Dash Express in the lab and it’s based on the OpenMoko design. What sort of tomfoolery would you like to see us do with it? What do you think the killer app for the Dash Express will be?

[via Gizmodo]

Laser Insect Photography Rig

June 16, 2008 by 9 Comments


[Marc] sent in this awesome insect photography rig. The camera is manually pre-focused and set for a 30 second exposure at ISO100. The aluminum cylinder in front of the lens is an external shutter mounted with a custom turned lens adapter. It’s used because the built in shutter is too slow for insect capture. The camera/shutter is triggered by a pair of lasers with photo detectors. When both beams are broken, the insect should be in front of the lens. A Garmin GPS provides position information that’s tagged on the image by the Nikon D200. A large photo of the rig is here, while a more detailed writeup on building it is here.

Update: It looks like we covered a previous version of this rig, but the old links are down and we didn’t have a shot of the setup. Oh, and I forgot to mention [Marc] new control box for running this rig.