Not any more >:-)
There may be cheaper GPS shields out there, but that's not the point. The point of the GeoShield is that it works, and it's competitive with commercial off-the-shelf GPS's. Out of the box. No coding, no digging around, it just works. And if you combine it and a TouchShield Slide, you have a completely portable DIY GPS... that is as powerful as most of the mainstream GPS's out there you can buy off the shelf.
This is the only GPS shield I've been able to test reliably in cities, from cars, and inside cases. So the steps to create an Arduino GPS with the GeoShield are pretty straight forward. You'll need:
The Lithium BackPack goes in back of the DoubleWide ExtenderShield next to the Arduino, and the TouchShield Slide and the GeoShield go on top. Like this:
Here's a link to the Open Source App Store app code that shows off a simple Night Rider program, plus polling of the GPS, Compass and 3-axis Accelerometer. The heart of the code is built into the Antipasto Arduino IDE function set:
void loop() {
gps_msg = geo.readGPS();
/* Print the GPS data */
Serial.print(gps_msg);
/* Parse GPS data and send to the PC */
//for (int i=0; i< strlen(gps_msg); i++) {
// handleGPS(gps_msg[i]);
//}
/* Print the Compass heading, Accel X, Accel Y, Accel Z data */
sprintf(out, "$GEO,H%d,X%d,Y%d,Z%d\n", comp, x, y, z);
comp = geo.readCompass();
x = geo.readAccelX();
y = geo.readAccelY();
z = geo.readAccelZ();
// delay(100);
Serial.print(out);
Sensor.print("co", comp);
Sensor.print("xa", x);
Sensor.print("ya", y);
Sensor.print("za", z);
}Here's a video showing it off:
The coolest part is that if you load up the pass-through sketch onto the Arduino, you can uncomment the coupe of lines that say, "print out to the PC", and then you can plug it in, load up a program like GPSFox, and get this:
Voila! Proof that it works - even from inside a friend's apartment!
Justin just uploaded the GeoShield over onto the Liquidware Shop, here...
