I have a Sparkfun GPS shield which I assembled this morning. I have the Arduino program on my little Asus Eee PC 900 running Ubuntu. I'd previously run one of the LED "Blinky" test programs, so I know that the notebook is talking to the Arduino . . . . I thought. I downloaded the Sparkfun test program from here:
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/GPSQui ... ng_v13.pde
It uploaded to the Arduino OK and I then switched on the GPS module. The status LED did as it supposed to and after about 40 seconds started blinking denoted that it has satellites! Clicking on the SERIAL MONITOR window . . . . NO DATA! 4 hours later of trying this and trying that, still nothing. Never seen anything displayed in the window. Mmmmm, either something on the board is faulty of just maybe it's a Linux issue?
After dinner a swopped everything over to my Apple iMac. As soon as I ran the Arduino program and clicked on Serial Monitor, loads of data! It works.
Next problem or maybe not. The unit is updating say every second. My position is totally static as the GPS is not moving at all BUT the course is changing all the time and with every refresh it's different. Hugely different. With no movement of the GPS, surely there should be no course? BUT it's varying between 40º and 120º ! Weird. However, I think that it will show a more meaningful figure with real movement. I'll make the whole kit a bit more mobile and take it for a walk.
You can clearly that the unit location is static!
Steve