New - Looking for Help - GPS Data Logger

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New - Looking for Help - GPS Data Logger

Post by 317 »

I stumbled upon the adafruit site in search of something that I have yet to find. I do a lot of off-road motorcycle riding/racing and I’m looking for a relatively cheap GPS data logger that is small/compact, has great sensitivity, has a high refresh rate (10hz), and will datalog (CSV) that info at 10hz to a micro SD card. Battery life isn’t a big issue, something in the 4-8hr range would work but obviously more is better. It’s been a while since I’ve worked with electronics but I’m not completely stupid and consider myself fairly mechanically inclined. I’m just looking for some solid information on where to start, cost, involvement, technical difficulty, etc. I would appreciate any input that anyone has to offer, thank you in advance.

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Re: New - Looking for Help - GPS Data Logger

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Our Data Logger Shield pretty much does that: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1272

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Re: New - Looking for Help - GPS Data Logger

Post by 317 »

Mike,

Thanks for the reply. Like I said, I'm relatively new so please forgive me for the dumb questions. I read about the Data logger shield (DLS) but was unsure of it's limitations. I understand that the DLS does its GPS samples @ 10Hz, but it won't datalog that frequently to its internal flash. I wasn't sure of the limitations when data logging to an SD card, i.e. will it record @ 10Hz to an SD card?

The more I hang out here the more I begin to understand that it's the software/coding that unlocks the potential of the hardware available.

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Re: New - Looking for Help - GPS Data Logger

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

It's all stuff you have to learn somewhere, so *not* asking is the dumb option. ;-)

The GPS module doesn't know how to talk to an SD card, so to read information from the one and write it to the other, you'll need some kind of device that knows how to talk to both. Usually that's a microcontroller built into an easy-to-use development board like the Arduino.

An Arduino will have no problem reading data at 10Hz from the GPS module and writing it to an SD card.

WRT programming unlocking the power of hardware, that's true in a lot of cases. There are other cases where the hardware does neat-to-awesome things all on its own. The programmable side is often called 'digital electronics' and the neat-all-by-itself side is often called 'analog electronics'. They're both good to know, and learning to use them together is part of what makes electronics an art (and fun).

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