SatNav

The application SatNav is now at version 2.00 and supports use with or without a monitor. It also supports power switching hardware in conjunction with an adafruit powerboost board (using a purpose-built circuit, described on icon bar).

NMEA syntax checking and logging have been improved.

Just to say that part way down the “C is not a low level language (any more)” there is the following interesting announcement from John Sandgrounder which is a bit lost down there:

Southport Sailing Club is using RISCOS to score the Junior 12 Hour Race which is held on the last Saturday in June each year.

Each boat carries a small GPS Tracker which reports its position to a RISCOS Server every 30 seconds (and more frequently at the end of each lap).

The GPS server then reports each completed lap to the race scoring program (also RISCOS).

Results are calculated live and updates sent to the Race Scoring website (Raspbian Apache) every minute.

The GPS server and race scoring are written in BBC Basic.

The results of the 2017 race and the corresponding GPS Tracks for each boat on every lap can be seen by following the 12 Hour Race – Race Results Site link on the Southport Sailing Club website.

The scoring for all but the first 3 of the linked previous 30 races was also done with same RISCOS program. GPS Tracking was introduced in 2017 (after a few years of experimentation). All of the software and website is on Raspberry Pi.

Just to say that part way down the “C is not a low level language (any more)” there is the following interesting announcement from John Sandgrounder.

Thanks Matthew.

I have been wondering where that post went. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be there! It was meant to be in “What are you doing with RiscOS”, which is where I re-posted it.

I would just point out that the program is basically GPS asset tracking not Satellite Navigation.

It will not tell you where your Raspberry Pi is located. But it will tell you where your car is….. or your bike, or dog, or in my case boat.

The following link will tell you where the program thinks 21 sailing dinghies are (live today, updated every 30 seconds)
Edit: The test race is not running today (Thur)

Of course, today the boats are not really there. But I do have 21 GPS Tracker simulators running on another Ras Pi.

It will not work on a browser which does not support the HTML5 ‘canvas’ tag. e.g. NetSurf)

The application SatNav is now at version 2.10 and supports full battery management using an ADC to measure battery voltage, current consumption and whether being charged (if so, it just shows current consumption rather than battery life). It also supports power switching hardware in conjunction with an adafruit powerboost board (using a purpose-built circuit, described on icon bar) so that power can be removed in a controlled way (first updating the log and CMOS shut down time) if the battery voltage drops to 3.4V.

It thus gives a OLED display like this:

|--------------|
|No log written|
|--------------|
|Battery life  |
| 74%   8hrs   |
| at  253mA    |
|GPSBat=2967mV |
|--------------|

The circuit overlay to do this is:

Have made a “GPS Mouse” with the Adafruid GPS breakout and have any first infos uploaded. So an external antenna not needed. The breakout is the external antenna.

The side is “under construction”. What I made is for the Pandora, but is comparable usable for a Pi.

The first Infos you find here.
I will made it ready soon with all the downloads (stl for 3D printing). If anyone need or has an interest, I can add the Pi information.

Have play around with my Pandora solution in car.
Have track a route with SatNav and load with RiscOSM, than I go back along the route…
Point1 and Point2 are screenshots. The red line is the “old” gpx route.
Not a navigation but an orientation. ;-)

Have uploaded the stl-files for 3D printing. Feel free to download.

But will the GPS modules work after April 6th? ;-)

https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Memorandum_on_GPS_2019.pdf

But will the GPS modules work after April 6th? ;-)

It looks like this is going to happen at 1am (midnight UTC) on 6th April

Sounds like the Millenium Bug. But every 20 years, rather than every millenium.

What date will all my GPS Trackers send me?

SatNav has been updated to version 2.21 which corrects a few minor bugs when downloading a log file to a USB flash drive.

It now supports the following modules:
Adafruit Ultimate GPS module;
PaPiRus Zero liquid ink display 200×96 version 1.2 (with pins 8, 10 substituted);
Witty Pi version 2;
Adafruit ADS 1015 ADC board;
PowerBoost 1000c float charging board;
OLED 128×64 display.

The unit is described here.

SatNav has been updated to version 2.30 which corrects a few more bugs and now reflects the finalised messaging protocol which can now be seen on the RiscOSM web site.

Geodata message protocol documentation available from our web site.