RSSI
May 18
Uncategorized Comments Off
Just like magic, I deceided that I would undertake my own PC based GPS guided autonomous vehicle project, and Sparkfun.com announces a new USB GPS Stick. I received mine today. This little thing is awesome. It’s essentially a GPS receiver roughly the size of a USB memory stick. It uses the Prolific PL-2303 USB to serial chip, which has drivers for every major operating system. It took less than a minute to install this nifty little device on Mac OS X Leopard, and it appears to the computer as a standard serial port device.
My only complaint is the lack of decent documentation. None of the documentation mentioned at what baud rate the device transmitted data to the computer. Of course that’s a minor complaint for such a simple device. It took just a couple of minutes to figure out the right speed of 38,400bps.
The data is streamed as plain ASCII data, making it easy to read from any programming language that can access the serial port. In my opinion, if you’re planning to make a PC based autonomous vehicle, this is the low cost device that you need.