Well, in my last post I talked about my new PCB Etching stuff. Well, I’m putting it to use relatively frequently these days, and last weekend I made a little widget to gather some data for me.
I thought to myself, as I was stuck in traffic one day. Since I’m commuting back and forth, to and from work each day on some of the local freeways around here, why don’t I make a GPS Tracker that I’ll stick in my car and will take position samples every so often. I can then plot these on a map, and associate speeds with the difference in time to the difference in position. If I do this for long enough, over the days / weeks / months / etc. I can get data on traffic over my commute route and correlate that to other phenomena going on, like weather, events, or etc.
So I did.
It’s an ATmega 328P (The same that’s what’s on the basic Arduino). With a 256Kb flash chip to store the data. Couple that with an old iPhone 3GS battery (A friend of mine asked me to replace the one in their phone with a new one. I kept the old one) and a Garmin 15L GPS module. Stuff a little bit of code on the microprocessor, and you’ve got yourself a GPS Tracker.
Hopefully soon I’ll have a page up where you can view some sample maps or something. For now you’ll just have to enjoy the pretty pictures of the device itself.