GPS distance measuring

I’m new to the Arduino world but have a lot of experience with PLC implementation

My project is to build a device that will measure (adjustable) distance in feet then sound a buzzer and repeat until turned off. So if moving in a vehicle it will sound the buzzer at whatever distance is set in feet repeating whenever that distance is covered again. The direction or heading is not important

Since I’m not familiar with the hardware available in hoping someone can help with hardware selection.

Needed:

CPU

GPS

Screen/interface

Buttons

Power switch

thanks for any help with this. I’m excited to start playing with Arduino!

Two points to consider:

  1. GPS coordinates are typically accurate to +/- 3 meters ( +/- 10 feet), if the GPS unit has a clear view of the entire sky. In more restricted situations the fix becomes much less accurate or is lost altogether. With the best GPS units, under the best conditions, and a nearby WAAS station, you can HOPE for +/- 1.5 meters accuracy.

  2. Arduino has only single precision floating point (32 bits, 6-7 decimal digits). Double precision floats (64 bits) are not supported. So, you can’t expect better than about 100 meters accuracy when working with latitude/longitude calculations, without special tricks. The Raspberry Pi is better suited to GPS type calculations.

If you are interested in the “special tricks” to get around the AVR gcc limitations, let us know.

Thanks for the input…I suppose a remote GPS antenna would work better than an onboard “hat” I do have nmea 0183 GPS information from an onboard Furuno GPS… maybe it would make more sense to use that and a Raspberry PI …?

An external antenna won’t help with accuracy, only in getting a fix under marginal reception conditions.

From Furuno "1-3M Accuracy (95% of the time with WAAS on and SA off)

Good enough for my purpose

Well, modern professional IMU systems (Inertial Measurement Units) include three systems: GPS, IMU, and RTK. RTK stands for Real Time Kinematics and relies on fixed ‘markers’ around the path of the vehicle. The latter talks to those, and gets its location more ‘precisely’. These systems are again ‘professional grade’ and command several thousand dollars. Your best bet again, is to try a raspberry pi. Let us know how you progress.