WORK ACCOMPLISHED:
Parts List: This week, I continued finalizing design choices for our project. One promising find this week was a SparkFun GPS Breakout that comes with an integrated IMU (SparkFun GPS Dead Reckoning Breakout – NEO-M8U (Qwiic)). This breakout would help us save money on parts, because we would no longer need to purchase a separate IMU, or extra cables. Additionally, this chip supports u-blox’s Untethered Dead Reckoning (UDR) technology which integrates IMU readings to improve GPS accuracy, meaning that we might no longer have to perform these calculations ourselves. This breakout would need an external U.FL antenna. I’ve decided on this model both because its price, and because it comes with an adhesive which would be convenient to stick to the underside of the board.
Also, after an insightful meeting with Prof. Bain and Joshna, I learned a possible solution to the issue of the Pi HAT taking up all the GPIO pins. I found a GPIO expansion/splitter that would allow us put on the Pi HAT, while still having other pins (such as the PWM pins we’ll need for the VESC) exposed.
In this same meeting I proposed my idea for navigation which involved projecting longitude and latitudinal co-ordinates onto an x-y grid of a finite square area. It was met with positive feedback which gave me some confidence about our approach. We also decided that we would draw power from
PROGRESS:
I’m slightly behind schedule, but with good reason. We had planned to have a parts list finalized at this point, but the recent finds are worth the slight delay. Thankfully, the RPi we plan to use is available from the course inventory so I expect that we will be able to get our hands on one fairly soon. The other parts needed for GPS tracking (the antenna, GPS breakout and Qwiic HAT) are also available with quick delivery.
NEXT WEEK’S DELIVERABLES:
Next week, after acquiring the RPi and GPS, I plan to write the basics of the tracking code such as establishing its location start up, and determining the distance between two points. I’ll also work with Sharon so we’re able to share this data with the webapp.