In the serial communication tutorial, I had said that having multiple HW UARTs is very handy. So in this tutorial, we will be interfacing ublox NEO6 based GPS module with one hardware serial port and log the data with the help of USB Serial.

Picture 5.jpg

Thanks to the TinyGPSplus library, this was a piece of cake. I did make a couple of changes to use the HW serial port instead of soft serial and set the device baud rate to 9600 instead of 4800. You could see these lines commented in the code.

Hook Up

The hook was pretty straight forward as below:

Explore M3 GPS
5v VCC The module has onboard 3.3v regulator!
1 (Txd) Rxd Pin 1 of Explore M3 is connected to Receive pin of GPS
0 (Rxd) Txd Pin 0 of Explore M3 is connected to Transmit pin of GPS
GND GND The holy ground

Gps m3 hookup.jpg

Code

Demo

Although the weather was cloudy today, the GPS was quite accurate. You can fiddle around with the code to show number of satellites, time etc. Below is the log of latitude, longitude and time. Seriallog.PNG

Location on Google Maps

Did a quick search for the location on from the log on google maps and you see; it seems to be fairly accurate, near our Office with the star mark there! 0 Maps.PNG

Google earth gps m3.PNG

I wish, we could do a battery powered GSM GPS logger with Explore M3 and plot that on the map. What do you think?