I’m really interested in aviation and lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of making a glass cockpit. This is a big project and most of my time will probably be spent on it. There are a lot of different systems for the glass cockpit like an IMU, an MCU to take in sensor data, a display for showing information and much more.
I’m starting off the project by working on understanding GPS. I’ve managed to make my own (albeit bulky) GPS receiver that shows coordinates, speed, altitude and heading:
This receiver uses the GP-2106 module, a 16×2 LCD display and an Atmega 328 microcontroller. I used the Adafruit GPS library to parse the NMEA data coming out of the GPS module. I’ve included a button to show different kinds of data but it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. I suspect that there might be some clashes between the external interrupt (the button) and the hardware timer interrupt used to check for new GPS data. It looks like I’ll be doing some refining.
Breadboarding the GPS
Moving everything onto perfboard
Coming along nicely…
I’ve also bought the breakout board for the GPS module which acts as a daughter board for the entire receiver and connects to the perfboard via female headers. The two trimpots control the voltage output from the regulator and LCD contrast.
LCD hot glued onto the board
Closed up and ready to go!