GPS with 4 or 5 hz update

Archive New Product Ideas
1

Dudes,

All the current GPS modules you have are lovely, but we are hankering for more updates for our specific application (eg: Garmin GPS 18 and the like).

Anything on the horizon for Sparkfun on the >1hz GPS department?

Thanks,

YtC

2

U-blox makes this 4 Hz module:

http://www.u-blox.com/products/lea_4s.html

Leon

3

We’ve contacted USGlobalSat about this. I’ll check with them to see what the status is.

-Nathan

4

Dont bother, at $99 bucks without an antenna who would but it.

Instead may i suggest the new EM-408 that USGlobalSat has out.

5

I am willing to spend $200 on a reciever that does what I need, and I need atleast 10Hz updates :).

http://www.u-blox.com/products/lea_4t.html

This unit provides 10Hz raw data output, which is quite nice if you want to do your own position calculations. It also provides carrier phase output and a selectable strobe rate (not just 1 hz). It is quite a reciever for the price.

I would love sparkfun to start carrying ublox recievers with breakout boards.

J

6

jerad.simon:
I am willing to spend $200 on a reciever that does what I need, and I need atleast 10Hz updates :).

http://www.u-blox.com/products/lea_4t.html

This unit provides 10Hz raw data output, which is quite nice if you want to do your own position calculations. It also provides carrier phase output and a selectable strobe rate (not just 1 hz). It is quite a reciever for the price.

I would love sparkfun to start carrying ublox recievers with breakout boards.

J

I’ve made my own little board for the u-blox LEA-4A, it should be suitable for the others. Connections are brought out to a Molex 0.1" connector.

Leon

7

I’d also love to see a breakout board with the u-blox LEA-4T

Another product I’d be happy to see is a breakout board for is the iTrax03 or iTrax03-S (the uNav based products, not the sirf3 based iTrax300 series they also seem to offer) from [Fastrax. Similar features to the u-Blox receiver like carrier phase output but should be quite a bit cheaper based on what I have seen. This can also offer fixes at up to 5Hz and also gives option for [100Hz raw output.

Would be great to see something better than the limited SiRFStarIII products currently offered by Sparkfun.](http://isuite.fastrax.fi/sdk/331/Common/AppNotes/APP_HighDataRate.pdf)](http://www.fastrax.fi)

8

Henri:
I’d also love to see a breakout board with the u-blox LEA-4T

Another product I’d be happy to see is a breakout board for is the iTrax03 or iTrax03-S (the uNav based products, not the sirf3 based iTrax300 series they also seem to offer) from [Fastrax. Similar features to the u-Blox receiver like carrier phase output but should be quite a bit cheaper based on what I have seen. This can also offer fixes at up to 5Hz and also gives option for [100Hz raw output.

Would be great to see something better than the limited SiRFStarIII products currently offered by Sparkfun.[/quote]

iTrax appears to need a lot of proprietary crap to make it work, I wouldn’t recommend it, the other ready modules however seem like potentially good choices though the price tags are a bit higher than what sparkfun currently offers.](http://isuite.fastrax.fi/sdk/331/Common/AppNotes/APP_HighDataRate.pdf)](http://www.fastrax.fi)

9

Grimm Spector:
iTrax appears to need a lot of proprietary crap to make it work

I assume you mean the iSuite SDK ? Yes that costs money and is proprietary but the SDK also lets you rebuild the firmware of it and make your own modifications and additions in source code level. So you could build simple products using the processing power left over from the GPS processing and the left over I/O the modules have.

But I don’t think other GPS manufacturers give you access to their device internals without paying money and accepting some proprietary restrictions either ?

Then if you only need to use the documented features of the basic firmware I don’t see why you would need anything more proprietary than with other GPS manufacturers. Also the iTalk binary protocol is documented in the iSuite3 InfoKit also available at the website: http://isuite.fastrax.fi/sdk/331/index.html

I have used iTrax02 and the iTalk binary protocol in the past and at least then I didn’t need anything more proprietary than what was available in the documents from their website. Well maybe it was that all the documents weren’t clearly put in front of you but after following the links you got the PDFs from there.

Also Fastrax didn’t seem that hostile towards private persons as I remember I contacted their support for some clarification when working with the iTalk protocol and they asked my address and sent me a cd with full reference implementation of iTalk parser code and I think also the source code for their [GPS Workbench utility and iSuite documentation (the free section without access to the internals of course). The same documentation was also freely available through the website but with all the PDFs in one place it did seem a bit easier to follow.

About the pricing I remember seeing a price of about £25 for QTY 1 from UK distributor for the iTrax03-S module. Don’t know about current pricing or how larger quantity might affect it.](http://isuite.fastrax.fi/gpswb/331/gpswb.html)

10

I’d also like to see high-rate and non-SiRF receivers. Nothing against SiRF, it’s just that I already have 4 SiRF receivers and I want to have more kinds of hardware.

I’d like to see chipsets with the raw data available; based on the protocol documentation, I’d like to see the following:

  • Fastrax iTrax3

  • uBlox ANTARIS

  • Magellan AC12

It’s too bad that the sirfstar3 is wiping out the sirfstar2 - I like SS3’s sensitivity, SS2 gives you carrier phase, and SS3 doesn’t.

Trimble’s TSIP, while fairly rich, its a bit of a bear to differentiate on the wire from Garmin - that whole lack of a length field really hurts.

I’ve been looking at Navsync’s CW25, but they seemed reluctant to play ball when it comes to raw data.