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10 years, 7 months ago.
Platform needed
Hi
I am trying to design a hobby project where I want a microcontroller platform to start with and I want to have a GPS on the board or like a daughter board that gives location update when asked for though an interface or a MEM shared location and communicate through bluetooth to a smartphone... Can someone please reccomend a platform already available for this?. Thanks.
1 Answer
10 years, 7 months ago.
Do you wish to use bluetooth or bluetooth LE (low energy). In case the first one: Doesn't really matter which one you use, any M0 platform will do (better than M0 will also work, but not really required).
In case you want BLE, your best solution is one of the many boards incorporating Nordics BLE MCU: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/?tvend=11
I meant Global positioning systems (lat and longtitude) updates... Can I get a daughter card plugged in through some interface or if ir comes with this it would be great
posted by 18 Mar 2015There are currently as far as I am aware no platforms with built-in GPS, so you would indeed need a daughter board. Every platform should be able to communicate with a GPS: They use a standard interface that they all support. You might consider one with an Arduino pinout, then you can buy a GPS board which you can directly put on top of the MCU board. However sometimes they do have limitations on which pins are required for the interface.
But long story short: You will just need to buy a random GPS board. You can search beforehand if there is existing mbed code for it, or if you need to write it yourself.
posted by 18 Mar 2015The UBLOX C027 http://developer.mbed.org/platforms/u-blox-C027/ board has GPS built in. However since it also has a cell modem it's not a cheap board and it has a few quirks (e.g. both USB and external power must be connected in order to work). If you want a simple clean solution then Erik's recommendation of an arduino compatible pinout mbed and a GPS shield is probably the easiest route. If you don't mind putting things together yourself then generally all a GPS module will need is 4 wires, power, ground and uart tx/rx.
Most GPS modules will default to outputing NMEA format data ( http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/nmea.htm ) at 4800 or 9600 baud. You will normally get the GGA, GLL and RMC lines at a minimum unless you command it to send something else. The NMEA information page linked has examples from a number of different receivers at the end.
posted by 19 Mar 2015