GPS Speedometer with Trinket M0?

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AndyV
 
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GPS Speedometer with Trinket M0?

Post by AndyV »

Hi everyone,

I've never built a project before. I wanted to try building a GPS speedometer for my car using:

ULTIMATE GPS BREAKOUT
AUTOMOTIVE GAUGE STEPPER MOTOR

I don't know much about microcontrollers yet but I'm interested in the Trinket because it's small and uses Python, which I'm already familiar with.

I want to do as many location updates a second as possible (Ultimate says it can do 10) for smooth and responsive gauge movement.

I'd like to run it on the car's 12v power and keep it small enough to mount in the dash.

I don't feel like this would be a very code-heavy project since trinket says it can only fit about 250 lines, but maybe it'll take more code to do this than I realize.

It's also super cheap, which is nice.

With that said, is this controller a good choice for this project? I've read as much as I can first but I'm still not sure if I know enough to actually start making any purchases.

Thanks for any guidance!

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: GPS Speedometer with Trinket M0?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

You will need 6 GPIO pins: 4 to control the stepper plus Tx and Rx to communicate with the GPS module. The Trinket has only 5 GPIO pins brought out to the edge of the board. An Itsy Bitsy M0 Express would be a better processor choice: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-itsy-bitsy-m0

You can use something like a UBEC to step down the 12v automotive supply down to 5v: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1385

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AndyV
 
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Re: GPS Speedometer with Trinket M0?

Post by AndyV »

Thanks, Bill. That helps a lot!

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