GPS FTDI and XBee

GPS/GNSS Development Boards
1

I’m delighted to report that going from u-blox-GPS to XBee-on-an-Explorer with just three wires…

And then from XBee-on-a-FTDI-USB-Explorer, I was able to record flight paths of my R/C planes.

I was also able to go from u-blox-GPS to FTDI-Basic-USB to record paths directly to a laptop.

The software in both cases was merely a terminal emulator which created a file which by way of GPSvisualizer website I was able to put into Google Earth

The Question:

Does that mean that u-blox output is an FTDI standard?

Is FTDI a bus protocol?

Walt

2

No, FTDI is just a serial-to-usb converter. It creates a virtual COM port to be used on your terminal emulator. The output of your U-blox module is serial.

Let’s illustrate both the situations:

  1. GPS + two xbee + FTDI:

GPS <-serial-> xbee <-rf-> xbee <-serial-> ftdi <-usb-> laptop

  1. GPS + FTDI:

GPS <-serial-> FTDI <-usb-> laptop

In your second case, you just eliminated the serial-rf-serial part.

3

This is a double posted topic, see: https://forum.sparkfun.com/viewtopic.ph … 58#p185658