This GPS Logger Is So Small…

April 24, 2013 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

small-gps-logger

How small is it? Two things should give you a good sense of scale, the SD card slot on the lower right, and the slide switch on the upper left. This minuscule module is an all-in-one GPS logger which [J3tstream] built.

Main system control is provided by a Teens 2.0 board. If you look really closely you’ll see the SD card slot is actually a breakout board which mounts on top of the Teensy’s pinheaders. Also on the board is a PA6B GPS module with a few passive components to support it. The back side of the board hosts a Lithium Ion battery from an old phone. Note the mangled pin header which works as connectors for the battery. [J3tstream] even built a charger into the project. He’s using an LTC4054 chip to handle the charging. We were a bit confused at first because we didn’t see a way to connect external power. But he goes on to explain that the USB port on the Teensy board is used for charging. Just plug in USB and press the button to get things started.

Throw Together A Temperature Logger In Minutes

October 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Rajendra] found an easy way to make a USB temperature logger. He already had a USB to UART adapter that takes care of the heavy lifting. On one end it’s got the USB plug, on the other a set of pins provide a ground connection, 3.3V and 5V feed, as well as RX/TX lines.

To get the hardware up and running all he needed was something to read a temperature sensor and push that data over the serial connection. An 8-pin microcontroller in the form of a PIC 12F1822 does the trick. It runs off of the 5V pin on the USB-UART, and uses the ADC to get temperature data from an MCP9701A sensor.

The sample rate is hard-coded into to the PIC’s firmware, but adding a button, or coding some serial monitoring could easily make that configurable. [Rajendra] used Processing to write an app which displays the incoming temperature info and uses the computer to time-stamp and log the inputs. We could see this as a quick solution to tracking wort temperature during fermentation to make sure your beer comes out just right.