Ultimate GPS Breakout MTK3339

[Lawndart]

Hello!
Well I was all excited and bought the breakout board. Then I read the bold print more carefully
Any timeline for the verification the altitude restriction has been removed?
How might you go about this verification?
Right now, my high altitude ballon project includes an old Garmin GPS35 which is quite a brick in comparison.
Cheers,
Lawndart

[adafruit]

Hello!
Well I was all excited and bought the breakout board. Then I read the bold print more carefully Any timeline for the verification the altitude restriction has been removed?
How might you go about this verification? Right now, my high altitude ballon project includes an old Garmin GPS35 which is quite a brick in comparison. Cheers,
Lawndart

hiya!

this product (announced today) has the high-alt restriction removed:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/746

the manufacturer says it's removed, we have no reason to doubt them - we of course are hoping someone can verify it soon too

thanks,
adafruit support

[jamescw]

Hi,

I have also got a couple of questions regarding this module:

1. I see from the code the PMTK command to turn on LOCUS and query the status, but any idea how to get the logged data out?

2. If I want to use a button battery for the the RTC to help with warm starts, apart from using he hardware jumper, is there also a setting i need to activate?

3. Do you have a list of the settings and values enabled by default from the factory, so that I can figure out what I need to turn off/on for my needs during a cold boot?

Thanks alot, and a great product BTW really looking forward to see how it performs as a low power data logger!

J

[adafruit]

hi james, the easiest way to extract LOCUS data is to upload a blank sketch, connect the GPS to pins #0&1 of the Arduino and use the GPS Tool software.
we're in the middle of writing a nice tutorial, and of course a sketch to extract the data...can you wait until next week for all this information?

[jamescw]

Lol yes I can wait! Only just ordered my board anyway so it gonna take a few days to get to London!

What I ultimately want todo is use a really small Arduino compatible clone to bootstrap the GPS module when turned on (a Teensy probably) then sleep the micro controller and let the GPS module do its thing with LOCUS until the battery runs out. I will then use a python script to interface with the board over serial and get a dump of the LOCUS data (using flags to denote start and end of dump etc).

The PC tool that comes with the module looks great (I assume thats how you worked out the LOCUS commands using the log?) but im a Mac/Linux guy and dont want to rely on that. Having the module do its own logging is remarkable so I really hope there is an easy way to get at the using using a microchip!

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,

James

[bchhabra]

Not sure I understand what you mean by "It is not possible to change what is logged" - is the logged data forever or canit be wiped clean and new logging data written after a numebr of uses?

[adafruit]

you can erase & reuse the logged data but the RATE of logging (every 15 seconds) and the information that is logged (date/time/lat/lon/alt) cannot be changed. if you need to log other data like the HDOP or Satellites, it is not possible using the LOCUS logger

[olegio]

Is it possible to get the logged data without GlobalTop software? Any Linux tools that might be useful?

No pressure, but are you still working on the tutorial?

[adafruit]

we are still working on the tutorial, some snags as an arduino is not fast enough to parse out the locus data - we had to write javascript to do it. will post on the blog when its ready!

[shagerott]

I am interested in using this board for an RC aircraft application. It appears that the antenna is embedded. Do you have any guesses whether this will work for this application?

Thanks!

[adafruit]

the antenna is embedded, but thats very common for RC - as it is very light weight. as long as you can have the antenna pointing up and not behind a metal screen, it should work fine

[scootn405]

I'm looking to start a GPS speedometer project for my vintage scooter. Is this sensor fast enough to be able to give real time, or very close to, speed ratings?

[adafruit]

absolutely, 10Hz is very very fast! it does have estimated speed output as well, but ONLY if it has a fix so it wont work in a tunnel, etc.

[jamescw]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the tutorial!

Seems the locus data is encoded in some kind of format, and you guys have a JavaScript parser somewhere right?

Any chance you could publish the source?

BTW: What is you resource for figuring out all the PMTK sentences? Doesn't seem to be much in the datasheets when it comes to LOCUS...

Cheers,

James

[olegio]

Thanks for the tutorial! (one of the links has a typo: http://ladyada.net/products/ultimategps/%22)

It seems my logging stopped working. Whenever I run Locus examples, I get "no response " (it worked before). Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks,